Software QA and Testing of a 'pay for performance' Marketing services portal

Executive Summary

Our customer is a leading performance based marketing services company where customers only pay for results and publishers receive the highest yield on their media. In their latest campaign, they developed an Advertising portal, a Free Gifts portal and implemented a rule based search engine for their main portal. Most of the applications were critical and voluminous.

The customer engaged ennovate to ensure that all these applications were bug-free. Since each portal had atleast 20 microsites, ennovate deployed a mix of manual and automated testing services to rigorously test every application and accelerate the test process. Manual testing involved functional, regression, performance, UI testing and negative testing; while test automation was done through Silk test and PERL scripting.

The Customer 

• Our customer based in California, is a leader in performance-based online marketing services. The "pay-for-performance" business model of our customer requires a performance-based online customer acquisition network that is passed to direct response marketers. Our customer enables its publishing partners to maximize the revenue from advertising inventory

The Challenge

• The online digital marketing model followed by our customer, involved Advertisers, Publishers and customers that signed up on basis of ads and offers. A number of web based applications catered to specific business requirements of all concerned stakeholders
  • Advertising Portal

    The customer's advertisers from the Education and Mortgage industries placed mircrosites/advertisements on this portal. Interested customers visiting the website were required to fill up personal information forms which were then made available to the concerned advertisers.

  • Free Gifts Portal

    On this portal, free gifts were offered to the interested customers in exchange to Third Party services subscription. In order to offer best gifts in various price slabs, categories, demand etc. an application software that helped Marketing professionals set up the best campaigns and best deals for visitors was developed. This software fetched data from search engines using Web services and stored them in a database.
    The personal information and deal opted data of interested visitors were made available to customer service executives on another web based application. This helped the executives to follow-up with customers, observe status of engagement and trouble shoot on glitches in transaction.

  • Rule Based search engines

    Advertisers generally laid specific parameters on nature of desired leads based on customer data for running campaigns. To facilitate this, a Perl based Rule check software filtered leads and offered qualified leads to the respective advertisers depending on the requirements set.

The Solution

For a successful business execution, all these web applications were required to be error-free. Most of the applications were critical and voluminous considering a large number of advertisers and publishers with minute customer details determining the business processes.
ennovate offered to test the above mentioned applications using Manual and Automated Testing processes. 

• ennovate's Testing services comprised of the following activities in staging and live environments:

  •  Test Plan generation based on functional and design specifications
  •  Test cases execution
  •  Updating Test Cases on every release
  •  Functional Testing
  •  Regression Testing
  •  User interface Testing
  •  Navigation, Browser compatibility, Database Testing
  •  Performance Testing
  •  Negative testing
  •  Bug Maintenance by means of bug logging and bug verification through online bug tracking tool

• Test Automation

  Performing functional testing on Advertiser Portals manually used to take a lot of time and efforts since each portal had at least 20 microsites. This called for Automation of Functional Testing on Portals. ennovate automated the testing process using Silk Test 7.1. Automating the tests led to the accelerated execution time and comprehensive test coverage on every portal.
  Also, to perform testing on Perl based Rule Engine, ennovate automated the process by developing PERL scripts to call the Rule engine.

The Technology

• Silk Test, Perl

The Benefit

• ennovate's Test Automation approach ensured that the application was rigorously tested covering all parameters at a reduced time frame