Today’s ad buyers are in a difficult position. With the coming loss of third-party cookies, the IAB projects that advertisers stand to lose billions of dollars in annual revenue. Going beyond the monetary aspect, this fundamental shift means advertisers will have to rethink how they target, optimize, and measure ad performance. 

Think about it this way: without the robust third-party data they’ve relied upon for years, buyers are less confident about where to direct their ad spend. They’ve lost the ability to target audiences that deliver results. And they’re struggling to understand whether readers are seeing their ads. 

The good news is, there are steps you as a publisher can take to help buyers address these challenges — and help your own bottom line in the process. It all starts with one critical concept: audience attention.

Viewability doesn’t go far enough

For years, the digital ad industry has used viewability as a proxy for attention. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined viewability as “at least 50% of an ad is in view for a minimum of one second.” Yet this covers the absolute minimum — one second isn’t enough time to convey a message — when it comes to actual human engagement. It also doesn’t measure ad performance. By using viewability as their main metric, many advertisers still struggle to deliver the right ad, at the right time, to the right audience.

So what exactly is “attention”?

As a metric, attention is intended to convey whether an ad captures the reader’s interest at a given point in time, making it a valuable signal of their likelihood to take action. Judging from all the buzz around the so-called “Attention Economy” — in the media, at Cannes LIONS, in webinars and ebooks — it’s clear that advertisers are interested in the idea of tapping into audience attention. 

There’s just one problem: at the moment, there’s no single, unified definition of what “attention” actually is. And with no clear definition of attention (or way of measuring it), there’s no clear path to optimization for either buyers or publishers.  IAB UK’s Elizabeth Lane explains it like this:

“Advertisers are excited about using attention to measure effectiveness, but they’re confused by all the different definitions being used in the market. The risk is that this confusion will lead to them not using attention as a metric and not taking advantage of the insights it can offer.”

Clearly, the most valuable audience segments are those paying the most attention. And publishers who can deliver clear attention signals to buyers can command higher rates for high-value inventory. To help capture the information publishers and buyers need to identify and target engaged audience segments, Sovrn has devised a new measure of attention called “engaged time.” 

Capturing attention for better optimization

Every time a user visits your site, they emit “signals of intent” – including clicks, swipes, scrolls, mouse movements, and more. And every interaction tells you something about where the reader’s attention is focused — and their level of engagement. 

This idea is the basis for Sovrn’s engaged time metric, which combines viewability with more than 50 distinct on-page reader interactions. As a result, engaged time measures not only when an ad is in view, but also when a person is actively engaged with the content. This ability to analyze ad performance and turn attention into increased revenue is the foundation of our data product, Sovrn Signal. 

Signal gives publishers the ability to:

• Understand the metrics buyers use to value ad inventory
• Benchmark your own performance against the market and other sites like yours
• Generate incremental impressions from your most engaged users
• Identify, target, and price your most valuable ad inventory

Across the entire programmatic ad stack, Signal leverages attention metrics to pinpoint the most engaged — and most valuable — ad inventory. Publishers can then use this data to appropriately price and package their inventory. That same data informs advertisers which ad units are most valuable and what factors contribute to higher ad engagement. 

Today, Sovrn is working with publishers using Signal to predict the “attention score” for each impression and pass this information to advertisers in real time. And we’ve found that buyers are rewarding publishers with high-scoring inventory with up to two times higher CPMs.

As our own Peter Cunha said at the AdMonsters Ops conference earlier this year:

“There’s a huge value for publishers in plugging the gap made by the departure of third-party data in determining the value of an ad. The more publishers can provide reliable data and context at scale around an ad opportunity, the better off the entire ecosystem will be.”

Get started today

The world of online advertising has reached a pivotal moment, with a unique opportunity for advertisers and publishers to join forces and unlock new solutions that will benefit everyone involved. Sovrn Signal gives publishers a simple, scalable way to measure user attention, access deep audience insights, deliver the data buyers need to target high-value audience segments, and maximize inventory value. 

It’s easy to get started with Signal, and a single fee gives you access to all its features and dashboards. To learn more, visit the Signal page on our website or send an email to sales@sovrn.com. Our team would be happy to provide a demo, so you can see the power of Signal for yourself.

The post Leveraging Attention to Help Ad Buyers — and Your Bottom Line appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

The online advertising ecosystem is constantly evolving. As a result, it can be challenging for publishers to keep up with the pace of innovation — especially when it comes to technical aspects like automated auctions and the back-end bidding process. 

Today, the vast majority of publishers rely on some form of header bidding, which debuted in 2013 as an alternative to the slow and inefficient “waterfall” auction process. Early header bidding solutions were limited, due to a lack of industry standards, proprietary code, and little collaboration between providers. But that changed in 2015 with the introduction of Prebid — a free, flexible, open-source solution that streamlined and standardized header bidding. 

Prebid is currently the most widely used technology for header bidding. But because it’s an open-source solution, you’ll actually see different benefits when working in Prebid with different ad tech partners. In this blog post, we’ll explore a few things you should know about working with Sovrn in Prebid.

Sovrn Ad Exchange works best with Prebid

The Sovrn Ad Exchange is built to deliver outstanding performance on a variety of header bidding wrappers — like Google Open Bidding, Amazon TAM, and more. But working with us in Prebid unlocks features and opportunities that aren’t available anywhere else.  

• Connect with a broader set of buyers. Buyers are increasingly focused on placing ads through the most direct path possible — and in today’s world, that means Prebid. Some buyers are actually deprioritizing supply through Open Bidding and TAM, and instead moving their ad budget exclusively to Prebid. So when you work with Sovrn in Prebid, we can connect your supply with a much larger universe of demand partners, giving you more opportunities to match with the right bidder and earn the highest possible rates.
  
• Get access to exclusive, premium deals. The Sovrn Ad Exchange offers many always-on, premium CPM deals that are only available through Prebid. Buyers are required to pay premium rates for the premium supply in our always-on deals, so you’ll earn more on your most desirable ads when you work with Sovrn in Prebid.

Layer in Signal to supercharge Prebid performance

Prebid’s open-source code allows providers like Sovrn to layer on additional technical innovations, taking ad performance to the next level. Our Signal data tool is custom-built to amplify the value of Prebid.

• Collect more engagement data. Signal measures on-page attention, engagement, and other audience attributes so you can more effectively identify the most engaged segments of your audience, flag high value inventory, and broadcast granular deal data to buyers through the bid request. 
  
• Drive more ad revenue. Engagement data from Signal provides deep insights about what’s happening across your site. As a result, you can  target more of your supply to buyers through the Sovrn Ad Exchange’s always-on deals that yield higher rates. On average, publishers who add Signal in concert with a Prebid connection see deal revenue from Sovrn double, due to increased scale and performance from viewability, attention and ‘non-cookie based’ audience matching that the Signal technology delivers.

Simply put, adding Signal in Prebid lets you earn higher ad rates on a greater percentage of your inventory. 

Get started today

If you’re currently working with other ad tech providers in Prebid, now you’ve got some great reasons to add Sovrn as a partner. And if you’re already working with us in wrappers like Google Open Bidding and Amazon TAM, there’s never been a better time to add Sovrn in Prebid. Just email us at sales@sovrn.com and our team will be happy to get you started.

Once you’re set up with the Ad Exchange in Prebid, don’t forget to layer in Signal. Our innovative data solution leverages the power of audience engagement to create exclusive opportunities in Prebid that you just can’t get anywhere else. 

The post Make the Most of Your Ad Strategy with Sovrn in Prebid appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

But without a firm date on the horizon, it can be difficult to focus on preparing for life after third-party cookies. Publishers have countless priorities competing for their limited time and resources, and the task of implementing alternative data solutions to replace  third-party cookies can seem overwhelming. Some are taking a wait-and-see approach, while others suffer from “analysis paralysis” because the fear of making a bad decision — or missing out on the “best” solution — is keeping them from moving forward at all.

However, doing nothing is literally the worst thing you can do right now. Instead, view Google’s extended timeline as an opportunity for action. There are a number of deliberate steps you can take to strengthen your ad strategy today and position your business for success in a cookieless future.

Here are five ideas to get you started: 

1. Diversify your revenue.

With the eventual loss of third-party cookies, experts predict that ad revenues could drop by $10 billion across the industry. So if your monetization strategy relies heavily on advertising — like most publishers — it’s time to investigate new ways of making money.

The good news is, you have endless options for expanding your revenue mix. Affiliate marketing is one obvious area to explore, including tactics like curated shopping, price comparisons, product reviews, and other types of commerce content. While it’s difficult to predict which techniques will be successful at any given time, diversifying your revenue streams will help to smooth out the inevitable ebbs and flows across the industry.

2. Use data and insights to optimize ad performance.

Regardless of uncertainty in the ad ecosystem, you should be squeezing every bit of revenue out of your ad inventory. Effective optimization of your ad strategy requires access to the right data, along with the ability to evaluate ad quality, monitor trends, and recognize potential problems.

Sovrn Signal provides robust data and analytics capabilities that make it easy to track ad performance and benchmark your inventory against the market. With insights from the Signal dashboards, you can easily identify opportunities and take action to drive your business forward.

3. Start testing now.

It’s important to remember that traffic on Safari and Firefox — more than 40% of all online traffic — is already free of third-party cookies. That makes these browsers an ideal environment to experiment before the ad ecosystem goes entirely cookie-free.

Take this time to assess your cookieless traffic and set up tests to see what kind of results you can achieve without cookie data. Consider an investment in addressability within these environments to help drive higher CPMs. Engage with advertisers to demonstrate how they can effectively reach their target audience without third-party data. The work you do now can not only increase the current value of your inventory, but also set you up for success when cookies eventually go away.

4. Bolster your ad operations.

If 2024 were here today, would you have the right team in place? Digital advertising is a complex business, and getting the right support for ad operations can help to ensure you’re earning as much as possible on your ad inventory. Even if you’re already outsourcing your ad ops, it’s good business practice to re-evaluate your ad ops partner from time to time.

As a Google Certified Publishing Partner (GCPP), Sovrn Ad Management has access to exclusive tools and products to help maximize your income potential — as well as customized training and technical support from Google. Our experts leverage the most innovative advertising technologies, to optimize your advertising strategy and increase ad revenue.

5. Conduct a thorough assessment of your ad stack.

While you’re reviewing vendors, this is a great time to evaluate your ad stack from top to bottom, including your DSP, SSP, DMP, analytics, optimization, and retargeting tools (and so much more). The ad ecosystem is incredibly diverse, with a wide array of tools and solutions to build a successful ad strategy. Having the right ad tech in place — and the right partners — can help to ensure your ad program is ready for whatever the future brings.

Bonus tip: Leverage audience attention to drive ad higher revenue.

 Today’s ad ecosystem depends on cookie data for tracking user behavior, authenticating identity, and setting ad rates — but it doesn’t have to be that way. By tapping into audience engagement signals, publishers have a unique opportunity to identify, target, and sell highly desirable audience segments hosted on their own sites — and regain control of inventory pricing.

Solidify your monetization strategy with Sovrn

Now is the time to make sure you’re doing everything you can to optimize your monetization strategy — and Sovrn can help! We’re constantly investing in new products, services, and functionality to help publishers diversify their revenue and grow their business faster. 

• Advertising: The Sovrn Ad Exchange provides everything you need to connect with advertisers, set pricing for your valuable inventory, and maximize your ad revenue. 
• Commerce: Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to diversify your earning potential — and Sovrn Commerce proves all the tools you need to build and manage your affiliate program. 
• Engagement: Our Signal data tool lets you tap into the power of audience attention to measure, compare, and monetize your most engaged readers and drive higher ad revenue.
• Ad operations: Sovrn Ad Management takes the headache out of ad ops with advanced technology, expert support, and robust reporting to keep your ad program running at peak efficiency. 
• Data: We’re working to provide publishers with a standard and scalable way to transact their first-party-data and increase the value of their proprietary data through data enrichment. 

To learn more about all the ways Sovrn supports publishers, just email us at sales@sovrn.com. Our team will be happy to provide more information and get you started with any of our publisher tools.

The post 5 Ways to Show Cookies Who’s Boss appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Sovrn Signal provides robust analytics capabilities that make it easy to track ad performance and benchmark your ad inventory performance against the market. We shared an overview of the Signal dashboards in a previous blog post, but today we’re going to take a deeper dive into how insights from Signal’s dashboards can help you identify opportunities and take action to drive your business forward.

Signal Insights dashboard

Effective optimization of your ad strategy requires the ability to evaluate ad quality, monitor trends, and recognize potential problems. The Insights dashboard puts key performance and audience attention data at your fingertips, so you can easily analyze your ad inventory performance and see how your ads stack up against industry KPIs. 

The Insights dashboard offers all the metrics that matter in one place, including viewability, impressions, engaged time, and click rate. This single, unified view makes it easy to understand your performance without manually aggregating data from multiple sources or building your own graphs. 

Here are a couple of ideas for leveraging the Insights dashboard:

Analyze inventory performance over time.

The Insights dashboard makes it easy to spot trends in your ad inventory and identify unexpected drops (or spikes) in performance. As you make changes to optimize your inventory — like adding new demand partners or adjusting ad placements — you can use the Insights dashboard to measure the impact those changes have on overall performance. 

Evaluate individual ad performance.

The Insights dashboard includes ad unit-level data, so you can ensure each individual ad is performing as expected. Evaluating discrete ad data makes it easy to identify top performing ads, so you can try to replicate them elsewhere on your site. Ad-level metrics also help to pinpoint ads with poor performance (like low viewability or click rates), so you can make adjustments as needed.

Signal Benchmarks dashboard

In order to understand the value of your inventory and price it appropriately, you need to know how your ads stack up against the competition. With the Signal Benchmarks dashboard, you can compare your own inventory against your industry peers or against the market as a whole, based on key performance metrics.

Here are a just a few of the many ways you can utilize data from the Benchmarks dashboard:

Improve ad value by comparing CPMs.

Understanding how your ad prices compare to other publishers in your space is the first step toward improving ad value. For example, the Benchmarks dashboard might show that your CPMs are lower than other publishers in your space. By analyzing other data in the Benchmarks dashboard, you might identify low viewability as a possible root cause. From there, you can start A/B testing things like ad placement and sizing to improve your viewability. You could also implement the Signal reload feature to increase viewable impressions. (More on that below.)

Capture higher prices by comparing attention metrics.

Audience attention is one of the main factors advertisers consider in evaluating your ad inventory. If the Benchmarks dashboard shows your viewability and engaged time are higher than your peers, you may be able to demand higher prices for your ad space. Of course, optimizing your price floor can be a challenge — and many publishers worry that pushing their rates too high will cost them bids. Sovrn is currently working on a tool to help automate floor pricing — you can help by completing this brief questionnaire and contacting us if you’re interested in helping us test this new functionality.

Improve CTR by optimizing website experience.

While clicks are a key metric for advertisers, publishers often don’t think much about CTR because they don’t control the ad creative. But there are plenty of ways to improve CTR — and drive more revenue — by improving your on-site experience. For example, if the Benchmarks dashboard shows that CTR is underperforming for certain ads, you could work to upgrade the content that surrounds those ads. You could also adjust ad placement, so ads are located near content with the highest engagement. 

The Benchmarks dashboard includes performance data for thousands of different publisher cohorts, and data is refreshed on a daily basis. You can filter data based on country, site category, site size, and more — to generate performance insights on a more granular level. 

For even more insights into ad performance across industries — and the factors that impact ad pricing — you can download our Advertising Performance Benchmark Report. This in-depth study analyzes more than six months’ worth of CPM data from thousands of independent publishers to provide accurate, current, and reliable ad performance benchmarks. 

Signal Reload dashboard

The Signal tool includes a reload feature that refreshes ad inventory after a period (e.g., 20 seconds) of engaged time. This allows publishers to generate incremental revenue by showing additional ads to their most engaged visitors. The Reload dashboard lets you see how much additional revenue you’re earning through reloads and which ad units are providing the most uplift. 

Here are some examples of how to use the Reload dashboard:

Validate your reload strategy.

The Reload dashboard provides a snapshot of ad performance both with and without reload, including key metrics like impressions, viewability, and revenue. This lets you see exactly how much uplift you’re getting, so you can confirm that your reload strategy is working as expected. Ad-level metrics also help to identify top ad units so you can replicate their performance.

Troubleshoot reload performance.

 The Reload dashboard may show that certain ad units are providing little to no uplift in revenue. With this insight, you can work to identify the cause of this performance lag. For example, you may discover that an ad has poor viewability or the reload feature wasn’t installed on a given page.

Get started with Signal today

All of these insights — and many more — are available with Signal, our easy-to-use data tool that lets you analyze user engagement and convert your engaged audience into ad revenue. With just a single line of code, you can measure user attention on every page and uncover insights to maximize the value of your ad inventory. 

To learn more, visit sovrn.com/signal. And when you’re ready to get started, just email us at sales@sovrn.com. Our team will be happy to demonstrate how Signal can work for you and get you started with a free trial.

The post Improve Ad Performance and Increase Your Revenue appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

But evaluating your own program only tells one side of the story. In order to get a complete picture of ad performance, you need to know how your program stacks up against other publishers — both within your vertical and across the wider publishing industry.

Our latest report, Advertising Performance Benchmark Report, offers insights across current, accurate, and reliable benchmark data so you can compare your site(s) to industry averages, understand CPM impact, and adjust their advertising strategy. Using Sovrn Signal, we analyzed more than six months’ worth of CPM data from thousands of independent publishers in the Sovrn Data Collective, covering 136,000 ad units and nearly 2 billion impressions per day.

Top 5 Findings to Help Benchmark Your Ad Performance

Here’s a quick preview of some key takeaways from this report:

1. Ad spend was down in certain categories due to global uncertainty

News and business sites saw decreased ad spend in the first half of 2022, as advertisers were wary of appearing alongside negative stories like the war in Ukraine, economic declines, and the ongoing pandemic. Automotive publishers also saw a downward trend in CPMs as supply chain issues continued to plague the industry.

2. Audience attention yields higher CPM

Unless an ad can be seen, it can’t make an impact. Our research found that inventory with 80% viewability or more (meaning there’s at least an 80% likelihood of being seen) drove 3x higher CPMs versus market averages. And after 12 seconds of engagement, CPMs jump by 85%.

3. Site traffic has minimal effect on ad performance

It appears that traffic volume doesn’t matter as much to ad buyers as conventional wisdom might suggest. Our research found that CPMs increase only 9% as sites cross the 10 million monthly page view threshold, as compared to those with less than 10 million page views per month.

4. Scroll depth has a meaningful impact on ad rates

Scroll depth is a metric for evaluating how much of a given page is consumed by the reader. On average, users who view at least 80% of the available content (i.e., scroll depth of 80% or more) are worth twice the CPM of those with a lower scroll depth.

5. Third-party cookies are still the gold standard  for ad targeting

The end of third-party cookies is almost inevitable, but they are still the dominant method for granular ad targeting. Our research discovered that CPMs on Chrome (which still uses third-party cookies) are 71% higher than on Safari, where cookies have already been eliminated. And while Universal IDs (UIDs) are being explored as a possible cookie replacement, they currently capture only 10-25% of the value that third-party cookies deliver.

Looking for more?

These are just a few of the many insights, findings, and data points available in our new Advertising Performance Benchmark Report. Download your copy to find out how your site compares to industry averages, understand current performance trends, and identify the factors that can help to improve your overall ad strategy.

If you’re ready to uncover more granular data to evaluate your site performance and drive more revenue, our Signal data tool can help you measure, compare, and monetize your user engagement. Schedule a demo today to learn more!

The post H1 2022 Industry Report: Data & Insights to Analyze Ad Performance and Improve Your Strategy appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..