PubMatic works hard to provide efficient infrastructure for our clients and improve our own products’ ease of use. Understanding industry pain points, and then innovating to address them is a core value of ours. With this in mind, our hybrid header bidding wrapper solution, OpenWrap now works with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to help publishers further monetize mobile inventory.
First, let’s start with a few refreshers on what AMP is and what it does.
What is an Accelerate Mobile Page?
AMP is Google’s open source platform for creating fast-paced, light-weight webpages optimized for mobile. An AMP is a webpage in which the loading of third party JavaScript is restricted and custom, pre-compiled HTML tags are created to optimize the page and load quickly.
Why is this useful?
An average ecommerce page takes around 6.9 seconds to load on mobile device. This slow load time is one of the biggest reasons users migrate to another page or app. However, with AMP, load time is reduced by about 40 percent.
How Ads Work with AMP
With the restriction of loading custom JavaScript in AMP pages, AMP provides a new html tag, known as an AMP ad, for loading ads in AMP pages. The AMP ad is optimized for mobile and loads in less than a second. It must be done this quickly because the audience tends to move away from the ad slot as soon as the content is loaded and thus the visibility of the ad decreases with slower load times.
Loading an ad under a second also improves the chance of getting a click. Additionally, Google caches the landing page so that after clicking an ad your landing page will load even faster.
Monetization Using Real-Time Configuration
AMP advertising allows for programmatic ad serving where a direct ad slot can be sold. Moreover, it provides publishers with the ability to configure different DSPs using it’s real-time configuration in AMP ad to set targeting.
How PubMatic Works with AMP
AMP provides users with improved flexibility by allowing multiple vendors for a single ad slot. However, they restrict it to a maximum of five vendors for a single AMP ad in their real-time configuration. PubMatic addresses this restriction with the flexibility of server-side bidding for a single ad slot by registering just one vendor for single AMP ad.
PubMatic provides publishers a simple user interface to create a profile with multiple partners. A publisher can later update their profile without changing code or HMTL. This provides more efficient infrastructure and increases opportunities to monetize AMP.
Here is a workflow of how PubMatic’s hybrid header bidding solution, OpenWrap, works with an AMP ad:
- AMP page is loaded where OpenWrap is configured
- AMP internally calls PubMatic RTC Endpoint
- OpenWrap internally calls all the configured bidding partners
- OpenWrap then has an open auction for all partner bids
- Winning bid is returned within targeting parameters
- Google ad manager call is executed after attaching all targeting parameters
- If OpenWrap line item is served, then creative is rendered via OpenWrap
If a publisher would like to have the benefits of AMP and use OpenWrap, here are some helpful next steps:
- Create a Profile/Version for AMP on PubMatic UI Console. Tags for the AMP page will be generated so you can display ads with OpenWrap.
- Configure them on the HTML page.
- Update bidding partners, if required, and it will all be reflected without requiring future HTML changes.
What’s Next?
In this ever-evolving landscape, publishers are leaning towards AMP pages for mobile users. It helps them engage the user by providing faster page and ad loading times. PubMatic is helping publishers by leveraging its OpenWrap solution to further monetize their inventory.
OpenWrap provides a server-to-server solution for header bidding thus overcoming the limitation of AMP for a maximum of five partners. OpenWrap also provides publishers with improved user targeting by optimizing user engagement and monetization.
Detailed instructions on integrating AMP pages on your website can be found here or contact your PubMatic rep for more information. To join our team, check out our open positions here.