The major shift in ad spend away from traditional media to digital media presents an enormous opportunity for publishers. However, this shift as well as the move toward programmatic sales adds new challenges for publishers. One of the most significant challenges publishers now face is managing and analyzing the mountains of sales data being created each day as they sell and serve millions of ad impressions in real-time.
Forrester Consulting recently released an August 2015 study commissioned by PubMatic, Real-Time Data Analytics: Empowering Publishers To Make Better, Faster Decisions, that reveals how real-time analytics can help publishers make smarter, more informed business decisions that drive revenue growth.
Real-Time Analytics Drives Publisher Growth:
As publishers sell more ad inventory programmatically, they need access to real-time actionable data to maximize the optimization of their inventory. According to Forrester, 67 percent of publishers believe that real-time data is important to their efforts, but only 27 percent of publishers report that they had access to it when making critical business decisions.
Publishers see significant benefits from real-time data in several areas. Sixty-two percent report increased revenue, 54 percent see better yield, 51 percent report the ability to make better decisions, 48 percent report uncovering new revenue opportunities and 42 percent maintain better inventory management.
Competitive Benchmarking Insights:
Adding context to this data makes it even more powerful. Publishers that are able to benchmark their inventory’s performance against that of their peer set within the framework of the real-time programmatic ad sales market are at a distinct advantage. These benchmarking insights allow them to improve pricing strategies, identify new advertiser partners and ultimately increase revenue generation. But only 24% of surveyed large publishers (those publishers with more than 500 employees) were very satisfied with their current competitive benchmarking insights.
One Holistic Platform for Data Management & Analysis:
With millions of impressions, come billions of data points. So it’s no surprise that many publishers are challenged by their inability to easily aggregate their multiple sources of data into one real-time data stream. Sixty percent of large publishers find managing large amounts of data challenging. In order to aggregate and analyze data, 52 percent use a data warehouse, 45 percent use data visualization and 45 percent use external partners – each representing a significant investment of resources. In order to successfully manage their inventory holistically, many publishers will need to migrate to one programmatic platform, to quickly and simply manage their growing number of concurrent data streams.
Technology that aggregates and analyzes data will continue to play a larger role in digital media and ad tech, creating more opportunities for leading publishers to innovate and drive their bottom line. Real-time analytics are an incredibly powerful tool for publishers to generate revenue, discover new revenue opportunities, benchmark against competition and optimize more efficiently.
