We are in the midst of what I believe to be the Winter of Ad Tech. Last year, our industry was pummeled by a blizzard of M&A deals that pulled numerous publicly-listed companies from the public markets. According to Luma Partners, 252 deals occurred in the US digital media space in 2017 alone, as a result of cutthroat competitive and governance headwinds. And they expect the regulatory pressures to continue to mount in 2018 with Apple’s Intelligence Tracking Prevention (Criteo has forecast a significant revenue hit in 2018 as a result) and the impending GDPR legislation in May 2018. Even worse, header bidding is causing infrastructure costs to soar as SSPs and DSPs alike are bombarded with ever more traffic—but filling ever less inventory.
This perfect storm of ad tech consolidation, tightening regulations, and rising costs means DSPs are under ever more pressure to weather the storm during the Winter of Ad Tech. At PubMatic, we are offering technology to help address these issues – in this case, the Media Buyer Console (MBC). The MBC is powered by easy-to-understand, real-time data and proactive deal health intelligence to help media buyers optimize various aspects of their business.
Supply Path Optimization
Supply Path Optimization (SPO) is a broad array of algorithmic and manual tactics covering the entire supply chain, from publisher to advertiser. SPO increasingly came into vogue for DSPs with the rise of header bidding along with inconsistent pricing and auction dynamics across the industry. In order to safeguard against these risks, a DSP should consider win rate, bid rate, eCPM and impressions at the publisher level (all of which are available with just a few clicks in the MBC).
Our clients have achieved greater efficiency with our global SPO partnerships. In November, PubMatic announced its partnership with Adelphic, a Viant people-based demand-side platform (DSP). By buying through optimized supply integrations, Adelphic is able to effectively manage queries per second (QPS) and infrastructure costs. In turn, Adelphic’s advertisers have seen improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of their media spend. Publishers can now expect increased spend from Adelphic’s thousands of advertisers while also gaining cross-channel fraud coverage for display, video and mobile.
Campaign Optimization
The MBC brings the lofty algorithms of data scientists down to earth for marketers through Standard Reports – commonly-generated reports that have been already created in the system and which you do not have to recreate. This feature empowers buyers with granular insights into what is resonating and what are lost opportunities across Publishers, Geos, Ad Format and Platform. Please see a few of the reports and available metrics below that help buyers optimize their campaigns:
- Advertiser Opportunity Insights: Provides information about the performance of the advertisers and the channels through which they have monetized impressions for the last 30 days.
- Metrics: Paid Impressions, eCPM, Revenue, Non-zero bids received, Total lost bids for Advertiser, Bid win rate for Advertiser, Average bid eCPM for Advertiser, Lost Bids (Floor), Lost Bids (Auction), Lost Bids (Block-list)
- Buyer Insights: Provides information about the performance of buyers for the last 30 days.
- Metrics: Revenue, Paid Impressions, eCPM, Bid Rate (%) for DSP, Bid win rate for DSP, Bid win rate for buyer, Bid win rate for Advertiser, Non-zero bids received
- DSP Insights Report: Provides DSP revenue by site and ad tag for the last 7 days.
- Metrics: Revenue, Paid Impressions, eCPM, Total Impressions
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Accessing Standard Reports
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Infrastructure Optimization
PubMatic is invested in reducing infrastructure costs and improving QPS efficiency with a few tools and data sets available in the MBC Analytics UI. Users can run more efficient campaigns with granular metrics in the MBC Analytics UI (QPS, Time Out Rate) and Inventory Exclusion.
Inventory Exclusion provides a self-serve UI to DSPs to regulate traffic from certain sites. DSPs can directly access this exclusion tool through the MBC to exclude sites or apps with undesired traffic coming from PubMatic. There may be multiple reasons for DSPs to exclude certain traffic, such as sites with high QPS, preferences towards certain type of inventory based on publisher, etc. Since DSPs can use this exclusion tool themselves, they can take action immediately without any delays. This also allows DSPs to restrict the traffic upstream on PubMatic’s end.
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Accessing Inventory Exclusion
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Through the MBC, Adelphic identified and filtered on inventory that had been driving up their QPS unnecessarily. By remedying these issues, Adelphic enjoyed a 51 percent increase in QPS efficiency, a 132 percent increase in win rate, plus a 2.3X lift in spend. We applaud Adelphic for their cooperation in the partnership.
The Winter of Ad Tech may bludgeon on, but through optimizing supply paths, campaigns, and infrastructure you don’t have to be left out in the cold.
PubMatic clients can access the MBC by visiting us here.
