Publishers grapple with various challenges in ad serving as they strive to take back control of ad decisioning. PubMatic is dedicated to servicing the needs of premium publishers, and recently released the white paper, “Lessons Learned in Header Bidding,” highlighting best practices in header bidding.
Today, PubMatic launched the market’s first enterprise grade wrapper solution, enabling publishers to holistically manage all of their header bidding partners, and completely solving for main challenges in header tag management and measurement. In order to get a better understanding of the ad decisioning landscape, and why there is the need for a full enterprise grade wrapper solution, we sat down with Hussain Rahim, Director of Product Marketing at PubMatic, to gain some insight.
What is the difference between header tags and wrapper tags? What should publishers be thinking of?
Header bidding technology emerged as a replacement for waterfalls, in order to give publishers back control of their inventory and gain transparency into buyers’ true CPM thresholds. This is executed through an on-page piece of JavaScript code in the “header” of a publisher’s website—thus the term, “header” bidding. Header tags allow multiple buyers to submit pre-bids on inventory before the publisher alerts its ad server.
Wrapper tags developed in response to the rapid adoption of multiple header tags by publishers, as it’s not uncommon to see anywhere from 5-10 header tags on a site, requiring a container to house them. A wrapper tag, commonly referred to as a container tag, provides publishers with technical and operational advantages that allow them to work with and manage all of their header tags in one place.
What are the major limitations of current solutions on the market? Why did you release this product?
With existing solutions, publishers face difficult integrations, operational inefficiencies in tag optimization and lack of transparency into key metrics. Due to this gap in the market, PubMatic developed the first enterprise-grade wrapper solution, enabling the holistic management of all header bidding partners and providing a transparent, real-time view into bid activity and volume, monetization and latency metrics. Solving for the common inefficiencies in ad serving PubMatic’s wrapper solution offers publishers unique features and benefits free of charge backed by full technical support and analytics.
- Streamlined Integration: Publishers can manage their header bidding tags easily and efficiently, eliminating difficult integrations by reducing the need to implement each header bidding tag separately. Ad operations teams are able to regain control of the ad decisioning process without having to rely on engineering teams for long, arduous integrations that require significant manual work.
- Intuitive and Powerful UI: The rich user interface allows publishers to move beyond the back-end coding and workarounds found in current offerings. The PubMatic UI provides greater control over demand sources for the publisher. Granular controls allow publishers to block low performing partners from bidding, helping to maximize revenue on each impression.
- Enterprise Grade Analytics: The real-time analytics and reporting platform enables a holistic view of a publisher’s header bidding partners, with a detailed analysis of metrics around volume, latency and monetization including bid rates, win ratios, and average CPMs, in an easy-to-access dashboard allowing for easy testing and optimization. These detailed insights allow publishers to identify their strongest header tags based on performance.
There is a lot of discussion around latency in regards to header bidding. How does this solution solve for that?
One of the biggest challenges that publishers face is high latency and slow page load times, which has led to the rise of ad blocker by consumers. This was further exacerbated by header bidding due to the influx of tags on a publisher’s site. As mentioned previously, the PubMatic Wrapper Solution’s intuitive UI provides granular controls that allow publishers to set latency controls and block high latency partners from bidding. In addition, publishers can easily implement customized page-level latency settings based on various geos and site pages. The ability to control latency ultimately improves site load times for consumers, decreasing the need for ad blockers.
Is this only something that affects publishers? Why should buyers care?
Although header bidding and wrapper solutions are publisher facing products, there are important implications for buyers as well. These new programmatic strategies provide buyers with a true “first-look” at publisher’s inventory and the opportunity to see every impression. This allows advertisers to have better audience reach and truly understand the real-time value of a given user or impression.
To learn more about how you can learn more about the PubMatic Wrapper Solution, click here, or contact us sales@pubmatic.com.
