Enriching Mobile, Embracing Data

By Alaric Thomas
June 26, 2013

It feels like we’ve been talking about Mobile for infinity in the online advertising landscape, with both concerns and great excitement. Every year technology platforms announce new outstanding systems created to enhance mobile advertising, building solutions to remove apprehensions around Mobile Tracking and Targeting. However, it still remains in the back of everyone’s mind, and as 2013 ends a successful first quarter, we reflect back at the discussions and debates we’ve all been swept up in around Mobile. How can we target without Cookies? How can we drive loyal users and measure performance? How can we ensure mobile devices are all tracked to the same standards?

All these anxieties around mobile all come down to one factor: lack of data. Unlike desktop, mobile presents a new challenge for technology partners to collate enough data to ensure both advertisers and publishers can trade premium impressions and not compromise the user experience. Collecting data for mobile is a different process to what we all know so well with desktop. Without cookies, we have to draw data from other offerings within the mobile environment; Geo, age, device type, carrier and so on. These pockets of data then have to extract a wide range of user related parameters which in result will add value to impressions.

PubMatic has recently launched a new set of Data Enrichment products, built to relieve all concerns around mobile, and enhance the buy and sell of digital media. Our mobile product package provides the opportunity to optimise data, by layering over 30 parameters of 3rd party data, and 20 fields of 1st part data values onto every impression. Applying these extensive parameters will enrich the value of every mobile and tablet impression passed through our platform, adding significant value to media where needed. Priding ourselves and our expertise within our market, we have recognised the trends within programmatic trading, and we know that enhanced, enriched data can more than double or triple the value of inventory. We saw mobile paid impressions experience an unprecedented growth of 1425% between Q1 and Q4 in 2012, emphasising that programmatic selling is becoming an increasingly viable way for publishers to monetize their mobile inventory.

PubMatic now has the capability to accept and offer a wide variety of options when tracking across mobile, providing four substantial solutions:

  1. We can accept and extract user data such as Unique User ID, Location (both latitude and longitude), Country, State, City, DOB, Ethnicity, Gender, Carrier etc. Location data in particular can allow advertisers to target specific users across all screens and work creatively to suit each device.
  2. We also have the ability to target campaigns against device, having the capability to reach Feature Phones, Smart Phones, Tablets, Video support, Pointing methods and so on. This proficiency will detect a variety of screen resolutions, shape and size offering a scope of platforms in which to engage with.
  3. PubMatic is now able to detect the carrier per device, which in affect takes the IP address from the user as the input, and sends to the carrier engine. This will encourage carrier parameters such as connection type – cellular/wifi.
  4. Having assembled all data parameters mentioned above, we can map all 1st party data into our API, enabling our demand partners to qualify and easily ingest.

PubMatic’s mobile offering has been implemented to ease the trading of media across all screens, whilst offering great value and uncompromising the user experience. With our new and exciting Data Enriching offering, we can now begin to discard all previous concerns around mobile, and begin looking across all devices.