To header bid, or not to header bid? That has been the question on the minds of premium publishers over the past year as the programmatic tactic header bidding has permeated the media industry. Last year, PubMatic released the white paper, “Decision Manager: Your Inventory. Your Rules.,” that addressed the ways in which header bidding can solve key challenges for publishers, primarily created by the outdated “waterfall” process in inventory management. This year, we’re taking a look back at header bidding successes and challenges over the past twelve months in a white paper titled, “Lessons Learned in Header Bidding.”
The new white paper explores how publishers can experience success with header bidding—to drive advertising sales—and what role technology partners play in the pre- and post- implementation phases. We see header bidding as a key part in the ad decisioning evolution paving the way for new innovations, such as wrapper tags (see more in Lesson 6).
In this paper, we seek to share what we’ve observed in header bidding over the past year and what trends will drive innovation in media buying over the next several years. Below are the key takeaways we uncovered in the white paper:
- Understand if Header Bidding is Right for You: Before implementing a header bidding solution, there are a number of pre-sale and pre-implementation questions that both strategic and technical teams at a publisher should ask themselves before implementing header bidding. For example, publishers need to understand their inventory mix, take stock of resources, assess direct vs. indirect sales priorities, evaluate their current priority setup in their ad server and identify average CPMs and fill rates from demand partners.
- Heed Expectations and Understand the Potential Pitfalls: Results from header bidding take time to develop and depend on a number of factors, including: 1) a publisher’s overall familiarity and experience in header bidding and ad decisioning, 2) whether a publisher has the operational and technical teams to implement and optimize header bidding and 3) whether a publisher attracts significant site traffic and inventory demand to necessitate header bidding.
- Set Both Short- and Long-Term Expectations in Header Bidding: In the short-term, priorities should be around setting up a sustainable, low-touch process, where publisher-side technical staff understands how to manage their ad server line items. With regard to long-term results, header bidding should lead to higher overall CPMs, as the both buyers and sellers “learn” how to better price inventory. The end goal in all this technical setup should be to create a foundation that allows media buyers to access a publisher’s entire ad inventory and buy any inventory that meets an advertiser’s campaign objectives
- Define Who is in Charge and of What: When implementing a header bidding solution, publishers and technology partners need to define the roles and responsibilities of team members on both sides. Once roles are defined, specific responsibilities must be assigned to all stakeholders throughout the phases of implementation: pre-sale, pre-implementation preparation, header tag implementation, post-implementation testing and measurement.
- Test, Test… and Then Test Again. Successful optimization requires post-integration testing on a daily basis, combined with weekly check-ins with a tech partner’s strategic and technical team members. Publishers should follow these three key steps: 1) Ensure there is open communication and agreement data sharing between publisher and technology partner, 2) Reset success metrics to include price, fill rate, bid rate (i.e. the number of bids coming in from the buyers) and win rate and analyze the performance of each and 3) Measure the bid response latency and creative latency separately.
- Prepare for Wrapper Solutions in 2016: Publishers need to understand if they should be integrating a wrapper solution, when they should implement and what they can expect from a fully integrated wrapper solution. Enterprise-level wrapper solutions provide publishers with control panels so that ad ops teams can manage multiple header tags (i.e. add or remove tags easily), demand levers that allow publishers to automate decisioning from both direct and indirect demand sources and integrated analytics and real-time reporting capabilities.
To download the white paper, click here. Please feel free to reach out to discuss the report with your PubMatic account manager or contact PubMatic here and someone will follow up.
