Conversations about private marketplaces can get just about as heated as political debates these days. Conflicting headlines suggest one day that PMPs are dead while others tout them as the only way to buy safely. Trying to decide on a PMP definition in advertising has become somewhat difficult as well – is the inventory exclusive, is there priority, or is inventory segmented on a unique factor (i.e. data or vertical)?
Setting all that aside you may be wondering why an SSP is even talking about private marketplace deals? Often, the response I receive from my agency clients is that buyers typically go to their DSP or the publisher directly to create a PMP deal, when not SSP sourced.
Well, surprise! SSPs can create PMP deals for advertisers too and have a wealth of data and insights available to help you to forecast, troubleshoot and optimize your deals. It makes sense, given that the SSP is the literal lynchpin between the buyer (DSP + agency or brand) and the publisher. We see billions of ad impressions daily and offer multiple targetable parameters for every impression.
How PMPs with a SSP Work
PubMatic has turned massive amounts of data into functional insights for the forecasting phase of campaign execution through our Targeted PMP (T-PMP) tool, which allows buyers to see how many available impressions they can get with their targeting criteria. For the activation phase PubMatic is not only making more SSP data analysis available but standardizing it and developing processes to help with targeting, bidding strategy and ensuring inventory quality.
The part of the process that hasn’t been addressed until now, but is typically the largest roadblock for PMPs, is troubleshooting. We often hear, “the PMP isn’t scaling – what could be causing an issue?” You run through your list of potential blockers from the simplest—campaign hierarchy settings, flight dates, budget, etc.—to the more complex. Those questions can include asking if the is bid high enough, if there is enough inventory available to find the target audience or what is filtering out a portion of the bids? It is always helpful to keep the IAB PMP checklist nearby seeing as it’s still pertinent albeit a little old.
Troubleshooting PMPs
Today every platform has some sort of troubleshooting component but most of the time it involves pulling cumbersome reporting and manual investigation to discover why the PMP isn’t scaling. Even after your investigation is complete there may not be a clear answer as to what levers will result in immediate scaling of the PMP.
PubMatic recognized this frustration for both buyers and publishers as an opportunity to capitalize on the unique position we are in—sitting between both sides and having the ability to create bespoke technology solutions for our partners.
We spent ample time interviewing clients and teams to determine what the pain points are with PMPs. Our biggest takeaway was the need for an end-to-end troubleshooting tool that provides a holistic view of the auction funnel. Such a funnel ensures one can get details on where ad requests or bids are being filtered and why and where are the bottlenecks occur. Further, it can also provide insight into what actions are needed to resolve the issues and tips for optimizing performance.
What’s Next?
At the end of the day PMP deals were created to solve for a problem of providing advertisers a safe, premium and private marketplace. While PubMatic is working to make the overall ecosystem is cleaner and safer with our inventory and ad quality initiatives, PMPs aren’t going anywhere. We want to ease and automate the process – it’s in our nature. Whether you create your PMPs with us, your DSP, the publisher directly or through various ad tech partners, know you can reach out to someone from PubMatic for actionable insights and get back to what you were doing.
To learn more about our PMP offerings, check out our solutions page or contact us.
