At PubMatic, we strive to provide solutions that help both publishers and marketers improve monetization. When thinking about solutions to build we consider the benefit to our customers—whether it will improve transparency and how we can deliver it in a cost effective manner.
Recently, our team focused on improving domain reporting and insights. As a quick refresher, a domain report allows you to see how an ad performed on a publisher domain. In particular, for buyers, improved domain reporting allows you to see where you are getting the best performance, so you can improve campaigns or shift budgets to target the more successful domains. For publishers, domain insights show you the high-value domains that provide the best monetization. Thus, allowing you to determine buyers and advertiser’s interests.
Domain insights, in particular, are an important element in multiple transparency initiatives for PubMatic, such as improving viewability scores and reducing fraud rates. We also leverage domain insights to contain infrastructure costs with the ever-increasing volume of data. These insights have become even more important with the growth of header bidding.
Improved domain reporting has increased transparency, resulted in infrastructure cost savings, and improved monetization. Here’s how:
Transparency
Domain reporting is a step towards increased transparency because it provides required inventory visibility to publishers, particularly publishers with multiple domains and DSPs. It also provides results on domain performance, allowing partners to optimize for revenue with effective PMP deals.
For the demand side, improved domain reporting provides insights into the inventory coming from publishers so it can be valued appropriately, allowing them to set rules to filter out unwanted inventory and monitor incoming data. This is particularly important if a DSP is buying from a publisher with multiple domains. This increase in transparency also allows buyers to use targeted deals by creating PMP packages for domains with a high viewability score.
Transparency is further developed in PubMatic’s efforts to fight fraud, at a domain level. PubMatic monitors domain-level fraud data and removes traffic from domains that do not meet our threshold standards. This effort is a step forward in our commitment to a fraud free ecosystem for our buyers and advertisers. We also monitor domains with low viewability scores and reach out to publishers with suspect inventory, enabling publishers to take corrective actions.
Infrastructure Cost Savings for PubMatic
PubMatic algorithms use domain reporting effectively to reduce infrastructure cost per impression. We filter out domains that do not monetize well, before ad requests from these domains enter into the auction. This enables us to pass on maximum benefits to our publishers, while maintaining lower costs to buy on our platform.
Improved Monetization
Our machine learning algorithms also use domain insights to send the most relevant traffic to DSPs. This not only increases publisher gains by reaching out to the best DSPs for the inventory, but also allows PubMatic to stay within the QPS limits defined by DSPs.
For publishers, these insights help them monitor the gross eCPM and send ad requests to PubMatic that are more likely to improve their monetization.
For buyers, domain reporting enables quick actions with domain-level discrepancy comparison. It saves time and reduces risk since SSPs and DSPs only need to block domains instead of entire publisher accounts, due to discrepancies. Additionally, domain insights improve monetization for allowlisted publishers.
What’s next?
In addition to the improvements in domain reporting, we also updated our technology and announced that as of August 27, 2018, we will not allow our supply partners to monetize inventory that is unauthorized per a site’s ads.txt entry. PubMatic is committed to fighting fraud and improving transparency for our partners, through efforts like improved domain reporting. To learn more about our efforts, check out our recent content or contact us.
