HilltopAds’ COO, Rimma Kulikova’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on Performance Advertising

Rimma, you have been with HilltopAds for over a decade, helping grow it into a top global ad network. What has that journey looked like from the inside?

It’s been a long journey, HilltopAds has been on the market since 2013, and definitely not a straight line. Like most companies that stay in the market for years, we’ve had to learn, adapt, and sometimes rethink our approach entirely.

What I’m most proud of isn’t a specific milestone. It’s the team we’ve built along the way. HilltopAds grew because we have people who genuinely care about what they do and constantly look for ways to do it better. That mindset has helped us evolve from a growing ad network into a trusted long-term partner for advertisers and publishers worldwide.

From day one, we’ve believed that sustainable growth comes from quality relationships, strong technology, and consistency. Those principles are still at the core of everything we do today.

HilltopAds has built a reputation for combining high traffic volume with genuine quality control. What has been the most important internal decision that helped you maintain that balance at scale?

One of the most important lessons we learned early on was that traffic quality can’t be treated as a one-time check. It has to be a continuous process.

The industry changes quickly, and traffic sources evolve just as fast. If you stop monitoring quality, even for a short period, it affects everyone: advertisers see weaker performance, publishers lose long-term demand, and trust starts to disappear.

That’s why we invested heavily in ongoing traffic verification, anomaly detection, and internal quality monitoring. Our goal has never been to maximize volume at any cost. It’s to create an ecosystem where clients consistently receive value and can scale confidently over the long term.

HilltopAds just launched Smart CPM for Popunder campaigns, automatically adjusting bids in real time to win impressions at the lowest price. What advertiser problem made this feature a priority?

Smart CPM was created to solve one of the most common challenges in performance marketing: scaling successful campaigns efficiently.

Launching and optimizing a campaign is only the first step. Once advertisers identify traffic sources that perform well, the next question becomes how to buy more volume without significantly increasing costs.

Smart CPM automates that process. It continuously adjusts bids in real time to compete for valuable impressions while staying within the advertiser’s pricing strategy. Instead of manually chasing the right bid levels, advertisers can focus on growth while the system works to maximize traffic acquisition efficiency.

Ultimately, it’s about helping advertisers scale profitable campaigns with less manual effort and greater confidence.

HilltopAds segments traffic into Activity channels rather than using traditional targeting alone. How does that approach give advertisers a meaningful edge over what most other ad networks offer today?

Activity targeting focuses on user engagement rather than simply demographic or technical parameters.

The first interactions a user has with advertising inventory are often the most valuable. At that stage, attention levels are higher and the probability of engagement is typically stronger. As exposure increases, advertising fatigue naturally begins to appear.

By segmenting traffic based on activity levels, advertisers can prioritize audiences with higher engagement potential and allocate budgets more efficiently. It’s a practical way to focus on traffic quality and user attention rather than volume alone.

With fraud and low-quality traffic being persistent pain points across the industry, how does HilltopAds ensure the traffic reaching advertisers is clean, and what sets your verification process apart?

Fraud prevention is never a finished task. New traffic manipulation techniques appear regularly, which means anti-fraud systems must evolve continuously.

Most invalid traffic is filtered automatically before it reaches campaigns, while unusual traffic patterns are analyzed by our specialists on an ongoing basis. We also combine our internal technologies with data from trusted third-party verification partners to strengthen detection accuracy.

What truly makes a difference, however, is experience. After many years in the industry, we’ve seen countless fraud scenarios and understand how traffic behaves when something isn’t right. That combination of technology, expertise, and daily monitoring allows us to maintain high-quality traffic standards across the platform.

HilltopAds serves both advertisers and publishers on one platform. How do you design features and policies that genuinely work in the interest of both sides without creating tension between them?

The key is understanding that long-term success depends on both sides succeeding together.

For advertisers, that means providing transparent targeting options, reliable traffic segmentation, and tools that help them find the right audiences efficiently. For publishers, it means offering control over monetization, content compatibility, and ad quality.

A large part of our work happens behind the scenes through traffic categorization, offer moderation, quality checks, and continuous monitoring. When those processes are done correctly, advertisers receive better performance, publishers generate more stable revenue, and the platform remains healthy for everyone involved.

Looking ahead, how do you see automated bidding and AI-driven optimization reshaping performance advertising for ad networks – and what is HilltopAds building to stay ahead of that curve?

Automation and AI are already transforming performance advertising, and I believe their role will only continue to grow.

Modern campaigns generate enormous amounts of data every second. The ability to process that data instantly, identify patterns, and react in real time creates opportunities that simply aren’t possible through manual optimization alone.

In fact, HilltopAds was among the early ad networks to integrate automated bidding and AI-driven optimization into the core of its platform. We recognized quite early that campaign management would eventually move beyond manual adjustments and rule-based optimization.

Looking ahead, our focus is not on replacing human expertise but on amplifying it. We continue to refine the technologies that have already proven their value, making them smarter, faster, and more adaptive. The goal is simple: help our clients reach profitable outcomes faster and make performance advertising more predictable at scale.

Write to us [⁠wasim.a@demandmediaagency.com] to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programmes.