Technology accelerates everything it touches. Nowhere does that seem truer these days than in the ad sales market. In the time it took you to read the previous sentence, millions of digital advertising impressions were auctioned and served.
Yet, while everything in ad sales seems to be speeding up to real-time, one thing has noticeably lagged – reporting and analytics solutions for publishers. Many publishers feel like they are playing catch-up to the sophisticated analytics solutions that buyers use to make decisions. Publishers are also wasting time trying to find critical data within overly-complicated reports. Finally, publishers struggle to understand the value of their inventory and how they are performing against rival publishers.
Programmatic advertising is creating mountains of data everyday. Publishers that can harness that data into actionable insights will be able to drive better business outcomes. They will be more successful than rivals that aren’t able to convert all that data into value. With that in mind, I present three things every publisher should demand from their analytics solution.
Real-Time
This is a real-time market, and a real-time market demands real-time analytics. Real-time analytics allows publishers to identify and immediately react to market trends, as well as uncover new opportunities as they happen. Instead of getting frustrated as they become aware of opportunities too late to take action, publishers can instead take advantage of changes in the market in real-time resulting in increased revenue.
You wouldn’t manage your retirement portfolio by relying on a stockbroker who uses stale market information. Therefore, publishers shouldn’t rely on programmatic solutions that don’t provide up-to-the-minute data about the market that they transact in.
Simple to Use and Easy to Decipher
Analytics shouldn’t bury publishers in mounds of data, or complicated reports that are difficult to understand. Instead, publishers should expect an interface that is easy-to-use and provides functionality that makes it simple to find critical data. Ideally, this means having a natural language processing capability that empowers casual and power users to search for data by just typing in questions using every-day language. The analytics solution should also provide visualization features, such as graphs and heat maps that make it easy to identify trends and data outliers.
Competitive Actionable Insights
Until now, the real-time ad sales market has been a black box for information. One way to open up the black box is for publishers to demand competitive insights that give them a view into the wider market. This means getting access to competitive data that provides insights into how a publisher’s inventory is performing against its peers. This type of actionable competitive insight will result in optimizing pricing and packaging strategies allowing publishers to maximize their overall revenue. Publishers could then also increase revenue by identifying new potential advertisers that are advertising on competitive publisher properties.
At PubMatic we believe publishers need robust analytics in today’s data-driven programmatic marketplace. As the leader of the PubMatic’s Big Data and Analytics Product Management Team, I am proud to be part of a company that is revolutionizing analytics in the programmatic advertising industry. This includes launching the industry’s only analytics solution to provide real-time data, and the industry’s only competitive benchmarking solution which allows publishers to make smarter business decisions that increase revenue.
If you’re interested in learning more about PubMatic Analytics you can view details here.
