By Jim Tarr, Director of Product Marketing
Since the early days of programmatic, publishers have been worried that the move to real-time auctions in ad sales would inevitably put downward pressure on the value of their advertising inventory. Some voices in the industry even warned that real-time sales would foster an inevitable “race to the bottom” for CPM rates. Part of the reasoning for this line of thinking is that publishers would be forced to make packaging and pricing decisions with minimal insights into the true value of their inventory. The fear was publishers would be forced to do the equivalent of holding a wet finger in the air to read the current market, and then hope for the best.
In a real-time bidding environment, each impression is valued based on various factors such as user age, geography, browsing history, operating system, content parameters, and more. As a result, buyers evaluate this data and place higher bids on inventory that they consider most likely to help them achieve their marketing goals. In this new paradigm, CPM rates can increase, if publishers are leveraging the right real-time insights about the value of their inventory.
Here are three ways publishers can use real-time and competitive insights to return value to the rate card:
Optimize Pricing & Packaging in Real Time
By using a programmatic platform that offers real-time analytics, publishers can derive insights that enable them to constantly assess their own performance. In a real-time world, publishers need actionable real-time data that allows them to make smarter business decisions if they wish to maximize the value of their inventory. Many publishers have been challenged by analytics solutions that provide stale data, making it difficult to execute nimble and smarter packaging strategies.
Compare Performance
Publishers should also consider using analytics that offers them competitive benchmarking insights into the broader overall market. Many publishers’ performance is hindered by a lack of competitive insights. Indeed, just 25% of media analytics professionals report being very satisfied with their analytics solutions. Publishers that have access to benchmarking insights can compare how various ad sizes and formats are performing against competitive peer publishers. Combined with real-time analytics, this benchmarking allows publishers to assess if changes are needed to its packaging strategies across different ad sizes, and ad formats such as display, mobile, and video.
Discover New Advertisers
Another critical way publishers can increase programmatic demand for their inventory is by using benchmarking insights to find buyers that are advertising on competitor sites, but not on their sites. This critical data can help publishers discover new advertising partners and therefore increase their overall demand. It’s one of the most powerful ways that publishers can use the data promise of programmatic to their advantage.
PubMatic is the leader in publisher analytics including the industry’s only solution that offers publishers real-time analytics and competitive benchmarking. To learn more about PubMatic’s analytics solutions for Publishers click here.
