In order to maximize affiliate revenue, you need to know what’s working — and what’s not — in your affiliate marketing program. That’s why Sovrn Commerce includes real-time analytics and robust reporting functionality, so you can analyze your performance and make smarter strategic decisions. 

But if you’re an experienced publisher with a complex program, you need deep insights that go beyond the typical reporting metrics. You may have your own sophisticated software, custom built to analyze your affiliate data and deliver the insights you need to optimize your strategy. You might also work with many different affiliate networks, which means evaluating and comparing unique performance data from each one.

Sovrn now offers an easy way to access your affiliate performance data through a simple API and ingest it into any system you choose. 

Introducing the Sovrn API Developer Center

The Sovrn API Developer Center offers a set of handy APIs to automatically deliver the merchant, link, and reporting data you need — as well as user-friendly guides and in-depth documentation to get you up and running quickly.

The Commerce Real-Time Reports API has two useful features for analyzing affiliate performance. The Transactions feature gives you a full breakout of performance data on every affiliate transaction and a comprehensive view of every monetized link. Data points include:

• Revenue
• Product purchased
• Order value
• Click date
• Click source 
• Country
• Device
• Link URL
• UTM details
• Program type
• Merchant
• Campaign
• And so much more!

Now with the addition of Aggregate Reports, you can set up an automatic download of predefined reports showing how your affiliate income was earned. Each report contains aggregate data on a specific facet of affiliate performance: Merchants, Pages, Links, and Merchandise. The information in these reports is similar to what you’ll find in the Commerce Analytics Dashboard, with some additional data points — and they’re fed into your system automatically via API. 

The Commerce Real-Time Reports API is just one of the useful tools available in the Sovrn API Developer Center — and we’re actively working to enhance and expand our API toolset in the months to come.

Sovrn Commerce APIs make affiliate optimization easy

Our new and improved Commerce APIs run on a single data set — the same data that powers our real-time reporting — to provide consistent, reliable results every time.

Rather than logging into the Sovrn Commerce platform to view program performance through our user interface and run reports, you can simply use our Commerce APIs to ingest data automatically on your preferred schedule. Use our preconfigured reports for a reliable view of affiliate performance through Sovrn, or feed our data into your own system to slice-and-dice it however you choose.

Our Commerce APIs are simple enough for publishers of any size. If you have a need for advanced performance data — and you have a web developer on staff — just visit the Sovrn API Developer Center to get started.

Trust Sovrn for real-time analytics, delivered your way

To thrive in today’s competitive marketplace and deliver what readers want, publishers need to make split-second decisions about what’s working — and what’s not working. So having reliable, real-time performance data is more important than ever. 

Sovrn is committed to giving publishers the best analytics in the market. Our Commerce Dashboard offers real-time affiliate insights, and now — with our Commerce APIs — you can access all your affiliate data in real time, wherever and whenever you need it. No other affiliate partner can offer better, faster, more comprehensive analytics capabilities. 

If you’re already a Sovrn Commerce customer, visit the Sovrn API Developer Center to get started — or contact our support team for more information.

Not working with Sovrn Commerce yet? Sign up now! Once you complete the approval process, you can start earning right away.

The post Real-Time Performance Data Anytime, Anywhere with Sovrn Commerce APIs appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

As a commerce-focused publisher, having accurate, timely performance data is critical to optimizing your strategy — and maximizing affiliate revenue. In order to quickly pivot and make split-second decisions about what is and isn’t working, deliver what readers want, and see all your revenue opportunities in one stream, you need a way to easily access data and analytics in real time. 

With the right data, you can answer questions like:

• Which products are selling best?
• Which brands are resonating with my audience?
• Which page placements are most effective?
• How many sales has my affiliate program delivered in the past week/month?
• How much affiliate revenue have I earned in this week/month?
• Which affiliate links are driving the most revenue? 
• Have my audience’s preferences changed over time?

But mining mountains of data across multiple platforms to nimbly optimize is easier said than done for most affiliate commerce publishers. And lengthy delays to adapt often mean missing out on the best deals, because affiliate rates and marketing budgets can change quickly.

Get performance insights in an instant

When you log in to Sovrn Commerce, you’ll now have access to performance data in near-real time through our updated analytics dashboard, including:

• Clicks and page views within moments of when they occur
• Revenue data within one hour of the earning event
• Consolidated merchant earnings

Only Sovrn can provide this level of immediate commerce data reporting, compared to the industry average of a full day or more for most commerce reporting tools. 

Take action with timely performance data

With real-time performance insights at your fingertips, you’ll be better equipped to optimize your commerce strategy and make smart decisions for the future. Here are just a few ways you can leverage this new data:

• Compare performance in real time. See which retailers or products resonate better with your audience to help improve merchant and product selection. Analyze which links drive the most clicks to optimize content layout and link placement.
• Conduct side-by-side experiments. Set up tests to get immediate insights into audience preferences, then adjust your content strategy based on the results.
• Estimate earnings more accurately. Revenue data is available within one hour, so you’ll always know how much you’re going to earn — and which merchants and products are the best source of revenue.

Maximize your affiliate earnings with Sovrn

Sovrn Commerce is the fastest, most flexible way to earn with affiliate marketing. Our industry-leading analytics capabilities are just one example of the many ways we can help you optimize your affiliate strategy. Check out these articles to discover how Sovrn Commerce can help you maximize your affiliate revenue:

• UTM parameters for better link tracking
• Non-monetized clicks reporting to maximize your earnings
• “Merchants at risk” reporting and other tools to improve merchant management
• Additional tips to maximize the value of Sovrn Commerce

Get started today

Already a Sovrn Commerce customer? Log in and start exploring your dashboard. Need some help to get started? Book a demo for a deep dive.

If you’re not already working with Sovrn Commerce, sign up now! Once you complete the approval process, you can start earning right away.

The post Supercharge Your Commerce Revenue with Real-Time Analytics appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Data gives you power. It guides your strategies, your decisions, and ultimately your revenue potential. Without a full picture of your header bidding data, it can be difficult to move quickly and confidently—and as we all know, in publishing, time is money. Many publishers find it difficult to see their data as a complete story: when you’re forced to access multiple dashboards across multiple partners, some of which may be reticent to show you analytics information, important decisions are sometimes delayed or ignored—or left unknown—instead of acted upon. If you have access to a consolidated analytics dashboard, such as the Sovrn Header Bidding Analytics dashboard, it’s easy to investigate revenue swings.

If you’re struggling to boost your earnings, here are four ways you can optimize your auctions and increase revenue based on your header bidding data:

Adjust the number of bidders to optimize CPMs

Ensure that you’re optimizing the number of bidders. Too few, and you won’t have enough competition to drive up CPM. Too high, and revenue can be impacted by too many redundant ad requests going out to the same demand via different channels.

• If the number of bidders is too low, increase it one at a time and use analytics to measure incremental revenue increases. Ideal number of bidders vary per site, but a good rule of thumb is no more than 7-8 max.
• If you have too many bidders, try decreasing the number one by one until better performance is seen in your analytics data, using 7-8 max as a rule—but again, the ideal number will be site specific.

Adjust your bidders-to-timeout ratio to improve yield

If your page has to wait too long for bids to return, your visitors could be leaving before bids have returned. If your highest CPM bidder experiences high latency, it can mean bad overall auction yield performance. Ways to address this include:

• Raising the overall timeout threshold to give all of your bids enough time (in milliseconds) to return. You’ll want to monitor page content load performance in testing.
• Using your analytics data to hone in on slow bidders and address specific timeout issues. Once you’ve identified the culprits, you can let them know that their slow response times may affect their standing in your header bidding setup.

Properly configure your header auctions to maximize revenue

When running a header auction on your site, it is important to make sure that all intended ad units that are called to the page are included in that page’s header auction configuration. If you’re excluding ad units or formats from your header auction that one of your bidders may have demand for, you could be missing out on revenue.
Once you’ve determined which ad units you want included in the header auction (ideally as many as possible), make sure that all of those ad units are mapped to all of the available bidders configured in your header auction.
Optimize your price granularity to improve impressions

If your price granularity configuration is too low (for example, 1.00 or .50), you may be impacting bid competition. Prebid-based header auctions allow for granular price settings based on publisher needs. The settings you choose should be determined by how many demand bidders you have in your auction versus the CPM price points where you sell most of your impressions. The prebid setting options are as follows:

• Low: uses 50-cent increments and is capped at $5 CPM
• Medium: uses 10-cent increments and is capped at $20 CPM
• High: uses 1-cent increments and is capped at $20
• Auto: applies a sliding scale to set different levels of granularity for different ranges of bids
• Dense: also applies a sliding scale but uses even more granular increments, especially at lower CPMs

With a better understanding of your auction performance, you’ll have more power to make strategic decisions. You’ll be able to move more quickly and more intelligently, and you’ll save time that can be spent instead growing your reach. Sovrn is the only SSP that offers a unified bidding analytics dashboard, and we’re dedicated to giving publishers more control over their own success. Joining our free Header Bidding Analytics beta is yet another method of achieving the independence that will help you thrive.

As is the case with all of our products, we’re constantly working on improving functionality and scope, and that includes building new features into our platform in the future. We’re also dedicated to including our publishers in our product development process: we value your opinions and your needs, and beta programs such as these make that happen. Give us your feedback—we want it. Not only will you be involved in making the tools we provide as useful as possible, you’ll have access to a platform that can you help you improve your performance metrics.
Join the free beta

The post 4 Ways to Optimize Your Auctions and Increase Revenue Based on Your Header Bidding Data appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

I’ve seen many publishers make the mistake of conflating Net and Gross payment terms with their SSP, Network, or Exchange partner. This can have a big impact on revenue at the end of the month.

With Net payment, what you see is what you get – so when a $1 CPM impression is filled, you get paid $1 CPM.

With Gross payment, the buyer’s fees or rev share have not yet been taken out of the bid. So with a rev share of 80% for the same $1 CPM impression, you will only get paid $0.80 CPM at the end of the month.

Let’s say you have three SSPs participating in an auction. SSP 1 and SSP 2 have net payment terms. SSP 3 has gross payment terms, with a 20% rev share.

Despite SSP 3 submitting the highest bid, you actually net out the least amount of money if they are declared the winner in the header.

Ideally, you should contractually require bidders to submit net bids. But, if you have both buyers who send net bids and buyers who send gross bids in your stack, you’ll want to adjust the gross partners’ bids down to level the playing field. Higher bids in the auction are great, but not if they don’t ultimately translate to more money in your pocket.  

In Prebid.js, use a bidCPMAdjustment function in the bidderSettings object to adjust any bidder that sends gross bids. For SSP 3 above, you’d want to make the adjustment to “return bidCPM * 0.80” to reflect the 20% rev share that partner takes after-the-fact. Bonus – this could explain why some SSP reporting never matches what you see in your ad server.

I’ve seen sophisticated publishers take this concept even farther.  They will take into account a slew of other factors with difference between demand partners.  That can include adjusting bids down for partners who take longer to pay you, for partners who have bigger reporting discrepancies, or for partners who push payment risk onto the publisher.

It’s a worthwhile exercise to go back and double-check the payment terms in all your header bidder contracts, paying specific attention to gross vs. net. You may be pleasantly surprised with more revenue at the end of the month.
Oh, and FYI – Sovrn’s bids are always net – so the CPM you see from us is the CPM you get paid. Transparency wins!

The post Gross vs. Net – How Publishers may be Losing Revenue in PreBid appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Pixalate released the November 2017 rankings for its Global Seller Trust Index, and Sovrn once again appears in the top 2 for the US.

The Global Seller Trust Index is an independent quality ranking for digital advertising. Ratings are based on an analysis of overall effectiveness assessing factors such as viewability, fraud, engagement, domain masking, network quality and more, in compliance with recognized industry standards.

Fraud detection is a consistent strong point for Sovrn, says Taylor Hamill, the company’s director of operations. So ranking high on this month’s Pixalate index is “a testament to how effective our work has been,” says Hamill. Fraud detection is a key part of Sovrn’s rigorous 25-step publisher approval process, which ensures strong quality and safety standards among our partners.

In addition to consistently ranking among the top sites on this Pixalate index, Sovrn is certified in all four Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) programs, and Sovrn UK has earned JICWEBS certification as well.

For the first time this month, Pixalate’s Global Seller Trust Index also includes ads.txt scoring. Sovrn’s ranking in this category is consistent with all the companies listed in the top 5.

A complete version of the Pixalate Global Seller Trust Index, including the methodology, is available for free download on the Pixalate website.

The post Sovrn Again Ranked Among the Most Trusted US Sellers by Pixalate appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Register here!
Date: Thursday 19th October
Time: 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm UK

The post Ad Fraud Webinar: Best Practices for Programmatic Quality appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

There are, however, strategies publishers can use to survive and thrive.

Getting ready for this most profitable time of year, publishers everywhere are working day and night to optimize their traffic. They are aligning partners, changing floor strategies, and activating content calendars to maximize performance. Yet in many cases, the best they can hope for is a boost of a few percentage points beyond seasonal norms.

Meanwhile, 20% of internet users filter ads, and most publishers we talk to aren’t doing much about it.  According to Informa Group, publishers worldwide stand to lose $35b by 2020 if the blocked web isn’t tamed.

At Sovrn we believe doing nothing is unacceptable. We’ve studied the industry extensively, spoken to nearly every company working on ad-block mitigation, and even bought an ad-blocker.

One thing that we’ve learned along the way is that solving monetization for the blocked web won’t be easy. There are a lot of different ways to approach the problem, and one size won’t fit all. Many publishers will need to take a range of approaches to meet the various needs of their users.

Listed below are some of the most popular ways publishers are monetizing the blocked web. We’d love to hear what you think and which, if any, of these methods you have tried. We’re also rolling out access to Sovrn’s own AdBlock Unlock mitigation tools, so let me know if you want to early-access by emailing labs@sovrn.com.

Strategies for Monetizing the Blocked Web

Messaging is the most common tool publishers use to address ad blocking. Publishers will fire a modal to blocked web users asking them to whitelist their domain. Sometimes whitelisting is optional, and other times it required to see content. Publishers can create these alerts themselves or use third-party tools to implement them.

Unfortunately, most users decline to whitelist publishers’ sites, going elsewhere for content, and some ad blockers are set to block this messaging by default. Furthermore, the traffic generated generally doesn’t perform well because the buy-side has very little data on these users. Without the data, brands, agencies and demand-side platforms cannot make informed decisions to buy advertising on pages viewed by the whitelisted user.

Messaging is therefore a start in the right direction for many publishers, but it’s by no means a panacea. One way to improve its success is to combine it with other mitigation techniques like the ones listed below.

Ad Recovery vendors help publishers by hiding their ad stacks from browsers. They use proxies and special content delivery networks (CDNs) to make it harder for ad-blocking extensions to filter out the advertising content that publishers are already planning to deploy to a particular user.

The upside of this approach is publishers “recover” a large number of their ad requests; the downside is that because there is little cookie data to sync for these users, overall revenue is generally lackluster. Its also a questionable user experience for readers, and some say a brand risk for the buy-side. “Why would brands want to pay to show their ads to users who explicitly said they don’t want to see them?”

For now, when users see ads despite having an ad blocker, research shows that users blame the ad blocker rather than the publisher or advertiser. However, that might change if more publishers try this approach.

Ad Insertion vendors use similar proxying or CDN technologies that make it difficult for ad blockers to “see” and therefore stop ads. But instead of leveraging a publishers’ existing ad stacks, these vendors use demand they have sourced.

It is very difficult to do this programmatically (ad recovery and ad insertion both largely rely on direct-sold), and the same user-experience questions exist. There is an opportunity, however, to improve advertiser demand for these users because the inventory can be sold from the start with ad-blocked audiences in mind.

Native and Affiliate Ads are less likely to be blocked by ad-blockers. Either they meet the acceptable ads criteria set by ad-blockers or are integrated into content such that blocking extensions end up blocking content as well. Without ad-blocking, native and affiliate performance can be hit or miss. Those same performance issues also exist in the blocked web.

Paywalls, Subscriptions, and Micropayments are often bundled with messaging techniques. It remains to be seen if users are ready to pay for text content. There are certainly corollaries in other verticals (i.e. Netflix and Spotify), but the independent web is much more fragmented than the music, film and television industries ever were.

That said, a recent report by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford suggests there is an increasing appetite for readers to pay for specialist and evergreen content alongside trusted sources of news, especially given the rise of fake news.

But What About the Data?

There’s one last thing that can’t be underestimated when it comes to ad-blocked users. Most of the tools (cookie syncs, fraud detection, viewability minimums, attribution pixels) that the buy-side uses to value ad inventory barely work (if at all) in the blocked web. The blockers either filter out data collection code directly (as in the case of the EasyPrivacy list), or they block the ad tags that fire data collection pixels along with ad impressions (as in the EasyList). Either way, the buy-side is consistently under-valuing inventory that mitigators recover or publishers whitelist.
Until someone comes along and can show the buy-side the value of ad-blocked users as an audience, the blocked web will continue to underperform.

What we are Doing….

Sovrn is not sitting still. We’ve been working on a number of initiatives to rebuild the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and the blocked web. The idea is to build a solution that ad-blocked users will tolerate, advertisers will value, and publishers will be compensated fairly for.
We’re starting with our own version of messaging, and we plan to layer in forms of the ideas above. We also have a few other opportunities we think we’re uniquely qualified to provide.

Please let us know what you think, or get started with AdBlock Unlock today. //

The post What Publishers Can Do about Ad Blocking appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Sovrn has built a strong reputation founded on brand safety, transparency and trust for serving publishers and buyers, and led the way in weeding out sub-standard inventory.  As well as receiving this JICWEBS seal, Sovrn was also recently awarded the seal for Brand Safety by JICWEBS, Sovrn also has a collection of seals from TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group), is a member of the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK and the USA) and AOP (Association of Online Publishers UK), and is a part of the Coalition for Better Ads.

The aim of the Good Practice Principles is to inject greater transparency into the UK digital display advertising market, ultimately giving brands greater confidence that their advertising will reach the right audience and will not be associated with content that could jeopardize brand reputation. The organisations that are listed as JICWEBS Anti Ad-Fraud signatories have been awarded this seal for reducing the risk of exposure to ad fraud.

Andy Evans, CMO at Sovrn comments: “Sovrn are incredibly proud to be recognised yet again as an industry leader in anti ad-fraud. We are constantly striving to ensure a safe environment for all of our partners, and this certification is proof that our rigorous 25+ step process offers outstanding assurances to our publishers and buyers.”

The full list of Anti Ad-Fraud signatories can be found on the JICWEBS website here.

The post Sovrn UK Verified by JICWEBS for Anti-Fraud Work appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

A recent AdExchanger article offered a detailed view covering the publisher’s quest for partners that drive both yield and engagement, as well as the trend for slimming down ad technology stacks.

“The pendulum is swinging away from complicated setups,” the article states. “Publishers are finding they can remove ad tech partners with little effect on their bottom line.”

So, how should publishers evaluate the value of their partners?

We reached out to some of our top publishers for their opinions. We also polled our ad ops team for their best tips and advice on how publishers can better manage ad inventory and evaluate tech.

1) Take the reins on analysis

The first step towards gaining control over inventory monetization — and ad quality — is obtaining a complete view of partner performance. And this makes robust reporting vital.

While implementing such reporting can be time-consuming, the insight provided by platforms such as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), or other analytical tools, is worth the investment. Using DFP, for example, publishers can blend multiple variables, including ad unit and date dimensions, campaign line items, revenue metrics, effective cost per mille (eCPM), and the downloaded impression itself. This offers a granular understanding of how each partner performs, giving publishers the information needed to truly assess their value.

Moreover, such tools save publishers the resource-intensive task of ingesting, storing and analyzing all bid data internally. Instead, they can concentrate their efforts on A/B testing of different ad formats, page layouts, and content to find the optimal fit for their audience.

2) Reconsider measurement methods

So far, most tech partner evaluations have centered on one thing: CPMs. But judging tech partners solely on the cost of ad units can be a bad move. Just because advertisers pay high CPMs doesn’t necessarily mean placements will be good for publishers or their audiences. For example, prioritizing revenue could mean ads that load slowly or otherwise disrupt a consumer’s experience can slip through the quality net, diminishing the experience and, in turn, the publisher’s reputation.

Consequently, it’s important for publishers to consider a range of criteria — fill rates, page load times, any bad ad complaints or reviews of excellent customer service — as well as CPMs. In fact, an increasingly favored method is to expand revenue focus by adopting revenue per page (RPP). This metric covers the revenue of a page in relation to goals like page views, impressions or queries. This means that publishers can pinpoint the value ads deliver individually, and in the context of the content surrounding them.

With such knowledge at hand, publishers can then determine what their tech partners bring to the table, and how experiences can be improved. For instance, they may find quality drives more positive responses than quantity and, as a result, opt for fewer ads.

RPP is already available to use as a metric with Google Analytics. It can also be deployed in combination with page level insight, which enables publishers to correlate ad performance with user behavior and traffic patterns, too. Indeed, when assessed over time – such as comparing audience activity and revenue at different stages of a month – it allows publishers to highlight patterns and ascertain when its partners deliver value, not just how they deliver.

And depending on the level of insight they desire, publishers can run many more comparisons, such as pitting RPM and CPMs against each other by a partner, and testing out different flooring or hybrid configuration strategies, such as variations in header bidding providers.

3) Remember audience needs

Last, but by no means least, is the need to ensure that the content ad tech partners serve aligns with audience needs. User engagement and revenue must be on equal footing, and so tracking engagement metrics — such as how long individuals spend with ads and subsequent interactions — is essential.

This is especially true as the market continues to mature toward cost per second (CPS) and cost per hour (CPH) advertising, to complement the traditional CPM approach. If reporting reveals that an ad tech partner only fuels a slight increase in yield, but a significant decrease in audience satisfaction, it’s a near-unmistakable sign that the partnership should be under serious scrutiny.

Analyzing ad tech partners isn’t simple, but it is imperative, both for business longevity and audiences. By embracing in-depth reporting and setting their sights further than CPMs, publishers can hone in on their most valuable partners, identify where the stack could be trimmed, and make sure their balance sheets level with the user experience.

And if you’re a publisher, our product Sovrn Viewable Engagement Time (Signal) can offer you longer engagement times and higher revenue. If you’d like to discuss optimizing your ad stack or adding Signal, contact your account manager at Sovrn, or contact us to be put in touch with our team.

The post How Should Publishers Assess the Value of Demand Partners? appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Protecting our publishers and their readers from ad-related malware are of paramount importance to us and we are constantly working with leading industry bodies to ensure safe and transparent programmatic trading of ad inventory on our exchange and have developed a strict process of over 25 steps to ensure industry compliance, brand safety and transparency for our buyers, our publishers and their readers. Building a premium ad network means holding ourselves to the highest standard.

Earlier this year, Walter Knapp, Sovrn CEO, posted a public blog post asserting our views entitled: ‘Stepping Up to the Plate on Trust and Transparency‘ – saying, “We made the right decision to tackle multiple independent 3rd party audits and accreditation across our entire network because we know that this is the absolute best way to ensure our publisher partners get the money they deserve for their work.”

Sovrn also holds the TAG seal for anti-fraud and anti-piracy.

Contact us for more details on our 25 step process.

The post Sovrn Attains ‘Certified Against Malware’ Seal appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Wrapped in the challenges above, we at Sovrn, see opportunities. Opportunities require investment. Our action to prioritize and focus our expenses today ensures that we can continue making investments to solve important problems for our core customer base of independent publishers.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve invested in expanding our Data processing and Yield management infrastructure, we released an easy-to-implement Header Bidding option to level the playing field, and we completed 3 acquisitions to solve important issues such as Viewability, Ad Block Mitigation and Content Distribution. In each of the past 2 years, we’ve grown revenues more than 50%, and in that time we hired over 200 people, all while remaining profitable and maintaining a strong balance sheet.

In order to sustain profitable growth, and keep making focused investments, today we consolidated our workforce in North America by 14%. Our UK office continues to grow meaningfully ahead of its targets and we will continue to invest actively in that market.

We believe that every interesting company solves important problems for someone else. At Sovrn we are deeply committed to solving important problems for independent content creators.

To learn more about how we help independent publishers do more of what they love, contact us any time.

The post Our Commitment to Independent Publishers appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

One judge from the panel fed-back: “Your entry was fantastic and I was not the only person who thought that. Congrats again and I am sure you will be mopping up more awards in the future.”

With the huge growth in programmatic advertising spend, the spotlight on viewability has never been brighter. In fact, programmatic display ad spending is forecasted to account for 72% of all display ad spending by 2017, up from just 49% in 2014 (Source: eMarketer, April 2016).

Created by the viewability obsessed team at Sovrn, Viewable Engagement Time is a user engagement metric that enables publishers to sell inventory on their website based on user engagement rather than impressions alone. Sovrn Signal units only create new ad serving opportunities after 30 seconds of viewable engaged time from users. If a reader leaves the browser window or scrolls the unit out of view, it stops counting viewable engagement time and no new ads are served in that zone until the ad is viewable and the reader is engaged.

Signal has major revenue impacts for publishers using the technology. Sovrn publishers utilising Viewable Engagement Time technology have seen an average lift of 56% in programmatic revenue and 51% average lift in inventory.

Viewable inventory is sold at a premium rate because advertisers are willing to pay top-dollar for ads that are guaranteed to garner real-time views. Simply put: they don’t want to pay for ads that are never seen! Because highly viewable inventory is so valued by buyers, publishers with high viewability rates are delighted by a higher yield. Publishers are happy with their increased revenue, advertisers get a better return on their campaigns, and readers benefit from less ad clutter. Win, Win, Win!

Sovrn is focused on evolving the way the industry values and trades advertising by increasing the overall quality and effectiveness of online ads through viewability.

Viewable Engagement Time (Signal) is an alternative currency for monetising banner advertising online, compared to the existing ‘served impression’ CPM model. The premise is that the way that banner ads are currently monetized (Served Impression CPM model) assumes that every impression sold has the same attributes and as such has the same value. The reality is far different.

Not every ad that is served is seen, and even if it is seen the extent of time which that ad is seen, or the engagement level of the user can vary tremendously. At Sovrn, we believe that publishers who create engaging content should be able to monetize based on their user’s onsite engagement, rather than have a static one size fits all approach to monetization.

As things stand, a site that has low user engagement and low page dwell time is rewarded in the same way as a site that nurtures engagement and dwell time. Signal is a solution that enables publishers to readdress this and monetize the full extent of the engaged users that they have nurtured on their sites.

Viewable Engagement Time is powered by more than 10 activity events collected on the page through Signal-enabled ad tags. This spans clicks, scrolls, tab changes and other user actions are aggregated to determine, at any given moment, if, where and how a user is engaged on the page. If the user closes the page, clicks on another tab or is inactive for 5 seconds or more then the Signal timer will stop counting.

Put simply, the benefit to publishers is that they can flip from monetising a static number of ads per page impression to an infinite number of impressions based on the engagement levels of their users. The more engaging your content is, the more rewards you reap. This shift helps publishers create substantial net-new inventory, which we monetize for them at a premium.

In addition to winning Gold at the Drum Digital Trading Awards, Sovrn’s Viewable Engagement Time also won silver in the ‘Technology Provider of the Year’ category at The British Media Awards and is currently a finalist in the ‘Digital Innovation of the Year’ category of the PPA Awards (winners announced on 29th June).
To test Signal on your site get in touch, we are here to help.

The post 56% Revenue Lift 100% Wins Drum Award appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

In March of 2017 we started a major upgrade to our platform, which we’re now pleased to announce was completed at the end of May.

What was the upgrade?

The Sovrn platform is comprised of three tiers: (i) Delivery – Ad Serving (ii) Data – Streaming Pipeline (iii) Analytics – Reporting Insights.

Our upgrade addressed all three tiers in order to guarantee stability, scale for business growth, and enable the best ad-serving technology for the job when building new features, on behalf of our publishers.

As we continue to grow internationally (we launched our London office in April 2016 through the acquisition of Signal), we have expanded our regional ad delivery footprint with multiple data center providers. This expansion will help to improve publisher yields by reducing latency between our publisher supply and our demand integrations. It will also continue to provide the capacity needed to guarantee consistently fast performance and high availability.

In addition, we also took the opportunity to implement a new more flexible platform architecture as part of the migration. The new architecture is designed to improve scalability by running our software in an elastic configuration, so we can easily increase or decrease capacity.

The migration included a move to new data centers with high speed dedicated networks and on-demand server capacity. This ensures that we deliver stability and consistent performance.

Furthermore, analytics processing has now been moved to cloud hosting, enabling our data scientists to use best-of-breed tools to greatly improve publisher business insights, expand our data solutions, and optimize bidding algorithms to help deliver more revenue to our publishers.

A trusted platform

Many ad tech companies like Sovrn are being challenged to process increasingly larger request volumes, generated through the evolution of header bidding and other innovative revenue generation tools. We have intentionally designed our new platform to easily adjust capacity based on ad volume coupled with an increasing number of demand integrations. This enables the business to target high yield supply for publishers.

We also have the ability to tune capacity in order to maintain expenses at the level needed to sustain our business growth and the longevity expected of a trusted platform.

Never satisfied, we will continue to keep improving our platform for the benefit of our publishing partners. We are committed to absolute reliability and speed, and we are always improving, so you can rely on Sovrn for uptime, speed, and agility.

If you’d like to know more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The post Significant Upgrade to Sovrn Platform Improves Performance, Reliability & Revenue appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Thanks for meeting today and thanks ahead of time for being our Ask Me Anything guest March 27-30 – we’re excited to have you featured!

I’ve been wanting to interview you for our thought leader series. The strategies you and your team have built have been replicated by many in the industry. Thank you for sharing your best practices to our community of publishers.

Let’s start –

CH: In 2017, what are some strategies you will possibly implement to continue your revenue growth in programmatic advertising?

ED: In terms of 2017 revenue optimization, we’re still not working with every partner we want to work with or plan to work with in the header. We are continually evaluating new opportunities to add unique demand. That said, I think the biggest thing we tried to do in 2016 that we’re still improving in 2017 is to better understand the impact of the header partners we have enabled and work to optimize for performance. For instance, building the capabilities to track and measure the impact to things like GPT fire time, ad render percentage, dynamic timeouts and lift.

We’ve developed ad tech that allows us to gain insight into a lot of things that were previously a black box before to better understand impact to overall performance, not just revenue. This allows us as a team to get to a place where we can say, “All right, the partner in this set up is working well, not working well or we need to dig further into that implementation to see if there’s something we can do to improve things.”

We wanted to take a step back and further understand the partners that we did have enabled, the actual lift they were driving individually and how they were working with one another so we could determine not only which are driving the most lift but also what additional levers, for example impact to latency, we could optimize. It’s slightly ironic but in a field that focuses on ad optimization it’s really challenging to get to a point where you can do true optimizations!

CH: Sounds like you did a lot of A/B testing to optimize the bids.

ED: I credit our engineering team and our yield team for all the headway we’ve made in A/B testing. Before we could A/B test, we needed to reach a point where we had the technology and infrastructure to support that setup and that’s something they drove.

It’s very challenging to accurately A/B test a programmatic ad stack. For publishers wondering how they’re going to continue to optimize in 2017 and beyond, investments in testing infrastructures are essential for understanding.

As you get deeper into header bidding, performance becomes much more complicated to understand because your lift percentage per partner goes down significantly. So it’s really important to be able to get to a point where you can determine that, yes, the additional partner you added is returning revenue, but how much have they actually increased overall revenue share versus just spreading the pie around?

CH: Latency has been an issue in header bidding, causing less ads to render and money left on the table. How has your team addressed this?

ED: Haha, well again, this goes back to engineering and technology. We’ve put significant investment in growing our engineering team, and really believe that engineering should have a dedicated role in ad ops, in addition to a traditional yield team. I think that’s essential if you’re serious about header bidding and serious about understanding the impact it can have, not only on revenue but also your user experience, overall setup and UX.

When we began to examine latency, we looked at the difference between page view growth and impression growth. As page views grow, you would hope that impressions grow to a similar level. By looking at these metrics, you can understand your impressions per page view, or ads rendered percentage, and see how adding or subtracting header partners is going to impact that. But, obviously, there’s a lot that can impact that final metric and it’s not a perfect one-to-one measurement but it’s a start.
To understand and then combat latency, we look at things like, “This is the impact to GPT fire time or this is the number of partners that have responded by the time your time out has run.” Those sort of things allowed us to say, “By adding this new partner, this is adding X amount of lift but an additional X% to your GPT fire time.” So really, in order to better understand the impact of latency, we had to get to a point where we could understand how running header overall was impacting our ability to serve ads to the user.

CH: What’s some new technology that you are excited about? Single bid architecture, HTTP2, server to server side, mobile video, in-view ads?

ED: All of those ideas are exciting developments, both for the industry as a whole and publishers. That said, before we jump to the new I’d like to stress what I think the key for publishers to understand; you want to get to a point where you are able to assess the true impact of your ad set up to overall performance, well beyond a DFP report. A lot of times as publishers, we think about what’s next but what should come first is that holistic understanding of what we’re doing now, and whether or not that setup is in fact, ideal.

Take header timeouts for example. Right now we have a static timeout but we’re working on a machine learning model that will push back what the appropriate timeout is for the time a user spends on a certain page within our website’s flow.

This allows us to not only provide a better user experience, but also make sure we’re maximizing our ad serving potential. A static timeout assumes behavior is the same for all pages and users and usually, that’s not the case.

CH: Other than programmatic advertising, what other ways do you monetize your sites and why have you chosen these strategies?

ED: We’ve been experimenting with what to do when users are running ad blockers. The sites that we run are primarily providing a service, so we want to determine what is a good middle ground where users can come to our sites and continue to use our tools for free, but if they’re ad blocking, we’re not able to monetize which is what allows us to bring them the tools for free. This doesn’t work from a business perspective and we have to figure out what that middle ground is. We’ve tested users opting into Google Consumer Survey or watching a 30-second video in a pre-roll setup that allows us to keep the tool free for the user while also providing an excellent resource for free.

This again ties back to understanding the impact on the users. In the situations that are opportunities to add revenue, what we really want to be cautious of and continue to have better information around is what kind of impact that has to the user experience. As a result, if we add a 30-second pre-roll, at a certain point in the user session, it’s not enough to just measure the revenue, you have to understand what kind of spike that has, what’s the exit rate? Then you have to do some of the decision making to say, well, exit rate is probably going to spike but at what point are we OK with that if revenue also spikes? It’s a tough balance and we try and work closely with our product team, who will at times push back, on what the right balance is.

CH: Okay, last question, how do you work with your product teams to optimize your ad strategy?

ED: One thing that we’ve realized as an organization is that it’s important not to silo. For example, the more engineering can be involved, or drive, ad optimization decisions the better because you have the intersection of divisions in the company and you can share goals, initiatives and challenges – that’s motivating to a team.

We take that same approach when we think about product. Product owns the user session, they run the funnel. Two ways we work with product is to figure out and optimize our ads without actual ad initiatives like adding a header partner. An example is viewability. Product owns the placements and they own the page layout, but it was really important for us to explain to them why viewability is important  – not just today, but why this work will be important for years to come. Working in advertising we get that but we can’t assume it’s obvious to everyone.

We have an initiative to make all of our ad placements above 65% viewable by the end of the year. These are goals shared across teams and we asked ourselves: What is the layout that’s going to work for both the product team, the user flow and for the ad team? So, that’s an opportunity where you can share goals and resources to achieve something in common.

The more you can tie in goals between engineering, ads, and product, and instead of siloing them, the more they can understand the goals and initiatives of the different divisions of the company, we found that extremely successful, and it also just makes for a better place to work because it fosters understanding and teamwork.

CH: Thank you Emry for sharing the key successes and strategies your team has put in place – and continuing to develop. I’m looking forward to the questions our community will ask you in the March 27-30 Ask Me Anything.

About Emry
Emry serves as the Vice President of Advertising for Chegg.com. Emry joined Chegg in the acquisition of ImagineEasy Solutions where he had been the companies first hire and founding member of StudyBreak Media. StudyBreak Media focuses on advertising optimization, utilizing custom ad tech, data science, analytics and engineering to maximize the value of their inventory. StudyBreak Media was an early adopter of header bidding and strives to be at the vanguard of programmatic technology.
Connect:
LinkedIn

The post Strategies to Improve Revenue & User Experience with Emry Downinghall appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Over the past several weeks, the real-time reporting publishers have come to expect from Sovrn has experienced delays. We believe strongly in transparency and continual learning & improving, so we thought we should provide a longer explanation of the reasons behind the delays and what we are doing to fix the underlying causes.

It is important to know that in spite of data delays there has been zero data loss due to the robust data protection infrastructure Sovrn has in place. All data is and has been intact. The core issues had to do with the processing of that data into publisher dashboards and reporting tables.

To understand the delays in data reporting, it is important to first outline the three tiers that comprise the Sovrn platform.

Tier 1

The delivery tier is a distributed “pod” architecture with points of presence close to the large population centers and demand (advertiser) buyer systems. Proximity to media centers such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, etc. enables extremely fast exchange auction mechanics, advertising creative delivery, and ultimately less latency for the reader of the site. With increased adoption of new auction dynamics like header bidding, the need to scale for high volume with predictable response times is becoming even more important.

Tier 2

The data tier includes the capability to capture, store, and then process data, at extremely high speed. Sovrn’s Publisher network exceeds 100,000 sites, where more than 1B people consume 90 billion pages of content every month. The systems required to process that volume of data are the same or very similar to large platform companies (think: Netflix, Spotify, Snap, Twitter). The reporting issues the publishers have seen were due to processing and network capacity bottlenecks at our primary data centers as data volumes increased in late January.

Tier 3

Finally, the analytics tier which includes individual publisher reports. The data tier feeds the analytics tier so as processing slowed and network capacity constrained, the result was publishers were impacted by delayed reporting in their dashboards and other reports.

Growth: The Best Kind of Challenge

Sovrn’s data processing layer starts with a data ingest queue, a centralized data store, and real-time and batch data processing pipelines to supply the analytics data. The infrastructure is designed to “scale-out” by adding additional servers as needed. What we discovered, was the data processing architecture we’d deployed made it difficult to perform critical systems maintenance while simultaneously running at the extreme volume we began to encounter in late January. Frankly, we were a victim of growth. We’ve seen an 8x increase in data volume due to a rapid expansion from primarily header bidding implementations but also from video and Signal adoption. When we attempted to perform regular system maintenance and adding additional servers, the infrastructure became unstable. This instability required several in-place upgrades, patching, and reconfigurations to recover.

We should reiterate that the ad delivery tier (Tier 1) was never impacted. Moreover, all data was intact. This was fundamentally a bottleneck in the data tier that impacted data processing and resulted in several weeks of slow populating dashboards and publisher reports.

Key Lessons

• Sovrn is a 24×7, always on system. We operate in North America, Europe, and Asia. It is simply not possible to take the platform down for maintenance. This means that configurations can become out of date and experience instability due to lack of regular maintenance (patches, etc.).
• The platform requires a more flexible architecture that provides flexible capacity and ability to remove or replace select components for maintenance without impacting overall processing.
• The platform must be able to quickly and efficiently spike capacity to keep up with both current and backfill data processing. As volume grows, the processing capacity required to catch-up from data delays can increase dramatically, further slowing things down.
• Our commitment to the publisher is to provide timely and transparent communication of causes, impacts, and responses when issues like the above occur.

What Publishers Can Expect Going Forward

Now that the systems are stabilized and reporting is current, we are moving to upgrade the processing capacity and guarantee data within an hour.

Each 3rd party component (MapR, Aerospike, etc.) will be certified by these third-party vendors and validated with quality assurance testing, acceptance testing, and parallel processing to confirm data validity. Phased deployments of these fixes, which allow for publisher feedback and rapid response during deployment, will be implemented.

We believe these investments will continue to provide publishers access to unique, high-value data that is delivered consistently, reliably and in real-time.

The post Data Reporting and the Challenges of Growth appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..