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

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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..

It’s important, however, to not just charge forward. I would contend that some of our industry’s woes stem from taking a step without looking approach. Example? The open exchange model sacrificed brand safety for liquidity – the market allowed some bad practices to become common practices, all in the name of growing the market. Now, we’re spending an enormous amount of effort to weed out the bad guys in our midst.

But this exercise is about looking forward and while I still search for the goal line let’s talk about some of the discussions I’ve had this past month:

Header bidding for president: I put the question out first, on the Sovrn Community forum, and pretty much got the response that I was expecting. No doubt that header bidding has for most publishers been a win, and will continue to do so. I still want to dive into the impact header bidding specifically has had on department structure. I think there is more nuance there that we can all learn from if more people share their thoughts on that topic. Who isn’t implementing header bidding and why? How much time are you spending implementing and maintaining your header bidding set up? What’s working well?

Viewability is like a vegetable your mom makes you eat. Nope, no love for viewability, especially in the Community. But, like those vegetables, I think viewability is good for you. In my opinion, viewability is a swing too far in one direction to overcorrect for some pretty bad habits. Realize it wasn’t long ago that some premium publishers had 20 ads on a page and didn’t care if anyone could see them. Sovrn clearly saw this and were smart to buy Viewability company Signal to help publishers proactively deliver more viewable ads.

That said, “Viewability is now a hammer” as described by the people I spoke to, however, I think this may only be temporary. Eventually, viewability will course correct and we’ll be talking about engagement. Is engagement a win for publishers? I think so. Have you found any great ways to deal with Viewability?

Talking about this stuff is hard. Try anyway. I knew going into this project that I’d be asking operations people to look up from their screens and think about things in a larger context, and just like the AdMonsters conferences, I find some people willing to think ahead and engage and others would rather compare bid density patterns. But this is important stuff. Operations must be both strategic and tactical and, in my experience, it doesn’t matter how “low” you are in the organization, you are in a unique position to provide a perspective that can help your company win.

In fact, I’d suggest diving into this conversation as a career development exercise. My career in ad operations took off once I stopped just doing my job and started to think about how to do my job better. That gave me the ability to be more strategic and be involved in more high-level conversations about whereas a publisher the company was going. That turned my job into a career.

In other words, a win for you is a win for your company. So let’s talk about winning and let’s talk about forward progress. Let’s share ways around the biggest obstacles as well as the new opportunities. So I ask you, what does winning look like to you?
 
Rob Beeler
Chairman of AdMonsters
Founder of Beeler.Tech

The post Update from the Road: What Does Winning Look Like? [Part 2] appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

So, how do you know if header bidding is the right monetization strategy for your website? Here are some factors you should take into account.

Traffic

A common question we hear from publishers is “how much traffic should I have to consider a header bidding setup?”

While there is not a one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to traffic, here’s what we tend to see.

The publishers we work with to implement header bidding usually have greater than 250,000 daily pageviews. However, that’s not to say that if you have less than 250,000 pageviews/day header bidding should be completely out of the question.

This is where dev resources come into play.

Development Resources

As previously mentioned, the header bidding implementation process is complex and requires some amount of development work. If you have a dedicated, in-house dev team that can help with the implementation at no additional cost, we say go for it, even if you aren’t at the 250,000 pageview threshold.

On the flip side, if you’d have to outsource development, we’d suggest taking into consideration the cost of outsourcing vs. the increase in margin you’ll see with header bidding.

As a benchmark, you should expect a 50% to 100% margin over your traditional waterfall setup, and from publishers we work with, typically you’d like to make back the cost of outsourcing within a couple of months after implementation.

If you’re currently generating $20/month in ad revenue, you should expect that to jump to between $30 and $40 with header bidding. The cost of outsourcing can vary greatly but will likely be in the range of $1,200-$6,400*. In this case, implementing header bidding probably wouldn’t be worth it.

However, if you’re currently generating $1,000/month in ad revenue, you should expect that to increase to $1,500-$2,000 with header bidding. Depending on the cost of outsourcing, header bidding may be the right solution for you.

At the end of the day, header bidding is a great long term solution for fast-growing publishers, but you should make sure you are generating enough revenue to make the upfront effort worth it. And stay tuned for Sovrn’s Header Complete product that is launching soon, the publisher-first header bidding solution.

*Note this is simply an estimate. These numbers are based off an $80/hour outsourcing cost and implementation time ranging from 15-80 hours. Depending on these two variables, this estimate could vary.

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What is the best advice for small scale publishers to get most out of CPM? Increasing fills/CPM rates?

GD: My first thought is to investigate header bidding if you haven’t already. By enabling your demand sources to see all of your inventory (and associated data), advertisers will be able to better evaluate the CPMs they are willing to pay. (You can use this data on the direct sales side too.) If you don’t have a lot of support staff to manage a boatload header bidding partners, investigate wrappers, particularly those with more managed services. If you’re concerned about latency, check out some of the header-based server-to-server connections rolling out.

Beyond that, take a deep dive into your reporting—tools like STAQ and Ad-Juster can be handy or look into a consultant. Re-prioritize demand sources based on bid rate and amount. Experiment—change things up for a week, give higher priority to one or two demand partners and see if they perform.

Is header bidding only useful for publishers using DFP?

GD: Oh no! Header integrations are useful with every ad server. It’s just that other ad servers may enable server-to-server connections within the ad server, which would cut down on latency and take weight off the browser.

How would you determine the floor price for a header bidding ad unit?

GD: I think very much the same way you would in the ad server. The header should give you some room to experiment—bump up your floor and see what it does to bid rate. Also pay careful attention to prices coming in adjust (hopefully upward) accordingly. It’s best to think of the header as an extension of your demand partner’s spot in the ad server—you’ve just got a lot more flexibility.

What role do you think video will play in header bidding? A detractor? A growth vector?

GD: Index Exchange and a few others have implemented header bidding for video—it’s an interesting setup, not very intuitive, but it seems to be working. I see header bidding in video working the same as in display—allowing other demand sources to correctly evaluate video in real time. I hope it boosts programmatic video selling (it could be a real boon for private marketplaces and real-time guaranteed) and inserts better inventory into the programmatic marketplaces. Yep, the open video marketplace is rife with bots and other bad news.
I imagine header bidding could be a great help to small providers of video content really trying to prove the value of their inventory.

A trend for this year seems to be moving header auction frameworks server side. While the performance and other benefits seem straightforward enough, does this move signal the end of client-side code entirely? Is there still value in having code on page?

GD: No, I don’t think so. A header-based server-to-server connection pretty much moves the auction from the browser to the tech provider’s server. You’ll still have code on the site, just the hard labor won’t be going on there. Because header partners only trust each other so much, most will want to set up their own S2S connections rather than work in the wrapper environment like header bidding. Also, thanks to single-request bid architecture, “traditional” header bidding is speeding up and using a lot less browser power. Some partners will find this the better way to operate.

Community Member: We are actually testing it out right now and are excited about the opportunity. From what I’ve read on server-to-server, there are a few drawbacks. One drawback we’ve started to see and read is that when you participate in serve-to-server bidding you the publisher, ad network, etc. loose control of the data and the full ability to see bid landscapes and adjust to improve ad bid performance. By doing server-to-server you also have to trust the numbers the servers tell you are real with no current accountability for commissions taken or impression priority given.

GD: I’ve heard that. Also from my friend Ben Kneen, AKA Ad Ops Insider:
Server-to-server “should improve latency concerns, but it may have a greater detrimental impact on yield than most expect due to worse cookie matching. “What’s your match rate” is going to be the 2017 version of “What’s your recommended timeout” for pubs looking at header bidding tech I think and they’ll have to weigh improved speed over decreased yield.

Thanks again to Gavin for joining us for the AMA! If you’re interested in the other topics that were covered, you can find them in the Sovrn Community.

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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..

What began as a word of mouth technical adaptation between savvy publishers blossomed into a significant slice of the programmatic ad business. The presence of header bidding forced Google to open up their ad exchange, AdX, to more competition and participation with other partners. The absence of a header bidding focus shaved nearly $200M from Rubicon’s market cap.

When viewed as part of a continuous evolution of ad tech from fixed prices and volumes, to “spray and pray” targeting, header bidding seems like less of a hack and more of a natural progression for publishers seeking more control, simplicity, and money.

Even so, it is still a gawky adolescent with much room to grow before becoming a mature technology. We expect this maturation process to continue throughout the next year, taking the form of increased adoption from the DFP user base, migration to more ecient server-to-server execution, and a greater focus on partner trust and transparency.

In this post, we take a look at the past, present and most importantly, the future of header bidding. We will focus on some of the publishers’ persistent challenges created by the move to header bidding, and talk about opportunities for the continued evolution of header bidding technology.

Solutions for yield optimization

With the header bidding “freshman year” out of the way, publishers’ attention turned toward the need for data-driven techniques for yield optimization. With more competitive auction dynamics and more visibility into demand bidding data, how do publishers maintain the inventory value uplift brought in by header bidding within reasonable, fair market pricing?

Many publishers have adopted tiered price floors as one solution. Tiered price floors, however, are flawed in that their maintenance is dependent on the manual manipulation and analysis of large datasets.

Without the ability to utilize real-time data to inform price floors programmatically, the value of a publisher’s advertising inventory may be widely inaccurate. The outcome is money left on the table or an artificial inflation in value which can degrade overall performance in the long term.

Employing an automatic floor pricing technique, which the industry has dubbed “dynamic floor pricing,” is a programmatic approach to what tiered floors attempted to solve.

Unfortunately, dynamic floor pricing has always been a loaded term for buyers. The primary concern is that modulating price floors introduce the potential for artificial inflation in inventory valuation. Floors based on static snapshots of data rather than those that fluctuate based on real-time patterns create potential room for error.

Still, publishers need an ecient way to ensure that the increased competitive behavior generated from header auctions result in advertising yields consistent with the actual value of their inventory. It’s not just how to increase value, but how to do it fairly.

One methodology involves tying bidder performance data to the domain, page, and zone-level data in real-time which allows price floor adjustments based on a richer set of value criteria. Bidder partner data can include bid rate, win rate, average bid CPM, average win CPM, revenue, bid load time and timeout metrics.

Another advanced approach can employ a similar set of data to run sample auctions and using the CPM recommendations from those samples to inform real-time bid floor adjustments.

This level of complexity and customization may not be realistic to implement or even useful for every type of publisher. These are examples of the opportunities header bidding makes available to create real monetization benefits.

Sell direct & get the benefits of header bidding

Publishers can still maintain valuable direct selling relationships with advertisers while still realizing the benefits of header bidding. Many publishers implementing a header bidding solution also want to keep a diversified selling approach to their inventory and are not willing to do away with premium, direct buyer relationships.

It is important for these publishers to ensure their header bidding implementation adds value and does not negatively impact those direct, guaranteed campaigns. With some specific DFP set up and management this can be achieved as Troy Hickock, CTO of Movieweb.com explains:

“There really shouldn’t be any issues with setting up guaranteed inventory in DFP alongside a header bidding implementation. The header bidding line items in DFP are by definition setup as price priority. So they just compete with other line items at the same (network, bulk, price priority) or lower (e.g. house) priority level. If you set up the DFP line items for the guaranteed inventory as standard priority with associated impression goals, the standard priority will take precedence over the lower priority line items like those for header bidding set at price priority.A publisher just has to remember that DFP will try to satisfy goals of the standard and sponsorship slots first. So that inventory will not be available to the header bidding line items and will reduce the number of impressions available for header bidding. Also remember that if you pause standard or sponsorship lines and you expect the inventory that was allocated to those to become available again to the header bidding line items, then you will have to use the ‘Release Inventory’ function on those paused line items. That will free up the inventory that was allocated to the halted item making it available for other line items to use.”

Latency is still a dominant concern for publishers

There is concern that header bidding is contributing to page load latency. So much so that response time has become a main selling proposition for many header bidding providers. Despite the focus, some argue that increased latency is merely a perception or that improvements to latency can be better solved through consolidation of operations.

The main argument is simple: more code on the page and more 3rd party scripts mean more activity on and o the page, which inflates page load time and hurts the user experience. Header bidding adds a layer of Javascript operations that has the potential to impact latency. Page load time is predominantly vulnerable if a publisher implements dierent header bidding solutions from various vendors directly on the page instead of through a wrapper solution to integrate their demand sources.

Recently, Sovrn conducted a survey to try and gain more clarity around the perception vs. reality question regarding latency. Initial results showed that while some publishers responded that they did notice an increase in page load time, the majority did not. There needs to be a more in-depth investigation regarding specific contexts and set-ups (e.g. the dierence between ad load time vs. overall page load), but this initial feedback lends some credence to the idea that there might be more of a perception than an actual problem in many cases.

In those cases where there is a latency problem, these may have more to do with putting header wrapper implementation and web design best practices into place.

Potential Solutions:
– Using a consolidating wrapper solution that can integrate with multiple bidder demand sources
– If using a wrapper solution, make sure to use a single timeout threshold that all bidders can be held to, e.g. 700ms. Dierent bidders set dierent thresholds that can increase overall bid response times

– Setting up general advertising guidelines for your website. These may include: file size, file types per format, creative content guidelines and policies (limits to external script operations), animation/play guidelines (length and looping limits)

Additionally, there are technology solutions being developed and tested by publishers to address the core issue of how to reduce on-page code operations and any possible slowdown that can result from introducing multiple header bidding solutions to their websites.

Server-to-server header bidding

Many publishers and technology providers are looking to server-to-server header bidding solutions to answer the latency issue. Server-to-server solutions take a lot of pressure o of the page, or client-side, and deliver a more consolidated approach to the header auction.

In an on-page header wrapper solution all of the targeted ads, per partner, are loaded into the web browser based on partner response time, internet connection, and the overall page element structure and configuration. In a server-to-server solution, handling of partner auction operations happens o page/browser utilizing Open RTB methodology. In this scenario, tracking of bid requests and responses is through a single conduit as opposed to multiple pipes (wrapper “adapters” or integrations) per partner.

Scalable, real-time server-side technology is a huge development lift. Publishers have been working with their development teams on where server-to-server fits into the queue. The result is that server-to-server solutions have been slow to arrive and become adopted.

Adoption of server-to-server will pick up speed as new implementation options, that do not require substantial development resources, arrive on the scene. Publishers will be quickly configuring their header bidding set up and deploying to their site with minimal technical resources.

There are a few undefined aspects of this emerging technology that are still in flux. First, SSPs and exchanges are wary of trusting server-to-server hosting entities which would, in theory, have visibility to all header bidding data. Second, some have recommended creating server-to-server connections to each header bidding partner. If not done effectively, would only reintroduce the problem that server-to-server is meant to solve. Finally, it would also require that all header bidding partners oer server-to-server capabilities, which is still on the horizon.

Google’s response – Exchange Bidding

Header bidding was initially seen as merely an innovative hack to get around business restrictions imposed by Google. But as header bidding adoption, customization, and optimization grew, the industry waited with anticipation for Google’s response. Many speculated that they would essentially shut header bidding down altogether with whatever they brought to the table.

Google’s response is their own, elegantly named, alternative to header bidding; Exchange Bidding for Dynamic Allocation (EBDA). As explained by Google, “Exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation will allow publishers to invite trusted third-party exchanges and SSPs to submit real-time prices using industry-standard RTB calls. These prices will be considered along with bids from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the publisher’s reservation campaigns to pick the highest-paying ad. Exchange bidding also empowers publishers with unified and accurate reporting on the revenue they are earning from each exchange/SSP. And just like First Look, exchange bidding works with no additional client-side code.”

Translation: publishers can now do what Google formerly didn’t allow them to do; choose other quality exchanges to compete with Google’s Ad Exchange in an open way without requiring development resources to update code on their website. Because the mechanics all run on Google’s servers, there‘s no concern of on-page latency.

Will publishers abandon their current header bidding investments for Google’s Exchange Bidding program like many have feared? Likely not. The influx of new rich data generated by header bidding has enlightened publishers to a new reality and power that they are unlikely to abandon.

That isn’t to say that publishers won’t adopt Exchange Bidding at all. Most publishers utilizing header bidding have one mantra: more competition is always better. If there isn’t a large impact on operations, most publishers will continue to increase demand whenever possible. Again, for publishers, ecient and results-based diversification will be key.

The influx of data is an opportunity and a challenge

The moment a publisher goes live with their header bidding partners, they enter a whole new ballgame when it comes to reporting. They now have the opportunity to manage bidder and ad server reporting data in ways that allow for analysis and presentation to drive decisions and action.

The problem? There are about a million ways to parse header auction data in a meaningful way, and not many tools out there are designed for that specific purpose. Too often publishers see the overall yield lift from header bidding but struggle with nailing down partner-specific performance.

The specter of discrepancies is also looming with header bidding. Thankfully much less so than with waterfall setups due to the consolidation and transparency of the header auction dynamic. However, there is still the challenge of analyzing and comparing third party bidder data with an ad server’s numbers.

For those publishers with data analysis resources, this creates a giant pipe of opportunities for understanding performance and informing optimization decisions.

For header bidding to find deeper adoption beyond the ComScore 1,000 sites, publishers need access to consolidated views of header bidding auction metrics. All publishers need exposure to bid density, win rate, win price and other key performance indicators on a partner-by-partner basis to compare against ad server and third party system data. Couple this with the potential for tying in dynamic floor price data and publishers will be empowered with a robust set of data points to inform eective decisions down to the partner level.

Conclusion

density, win rate, win price and other key performance indicators on a partner-by-partner basis to compare against ad server and third party system data. Couple this with the potential for tying in dynamic floor price data and publishers will be empowered with a robust set of data points to inform eective decisions down to the partner level.Header bidding has experienced astonishing growth in its adoption, assimilation, and customized application. Many exciting opportunities and challenges remain for publishers and their advertising partners to tackle next. While a significant component of this evolution will have to do with the technology itself, standardization, best practices, and the relationship between sellers, buyers and, technology vendors of all sizes will also be key factors.

Header bidding has given publishers more control, simplicity and, most importantly, more money. Given those three things, it is hard to imagine that header bidding is just a fad. Will the header bidding of tomorrow look like it does today? Probably not, but the evolution will continue, and publishers will have more power.

The post The Past, Present, and Future of Header Bidding appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

Hi Chris and Mike, I’ve been looking forward to this interview. SpanishDict was a header bidding early adopter and quickly developed sophisticated optimization strategies to maximize your monetary performance. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with our community. Let’s get started!

CH: Looking back on 2016, which monetization strategies worked well, and which didn’t? How would you change things going forward?

CM: The single biggest impact on our revenue in 2016 was expanding the use of header bidding. We went from just a couple partners to around 15 active header bidders, and as we added more demand to the site, prices went up. We saw that more competition is better for publishers; people have said that in the abstracts for years. With header bidding, we had a very strong bottom line impact in 2016. So that’s the most important initiative that we had for 2016.

In terms of what we tried and what didn’t work, we actually run experiments constantly on our site to try to determine what will add revenue while preserving a good user experience. And, a lot of those experiments didn’t work.

We found that while many of the header bidders that we added provide incremental value, a number of them we tested were removed because they did not provide any value.

They may have accounted for some revenue, but the corresponding slow down in the auction or slow down of the site may have negated that revenue increase.

We also tried a number of price flooring strategies with a lot of different partners. Some of them helped. Others didn’t. We tried moving people into Prebid and moving people out of Prebid. Most of the time it was better with them inside Prebid, but sometimes it wasn’t. So we still have a few people that are not in Prebid.

In the absence of these fast response times, we’ve experimented with different flooring strategies, and we’ve seen some good results from trying to set price floors that reflect what we think the impression will be worth. Every partner has different price flooring capabilities. Some you have to set it within the UI. Some you can do with real-time floors based on the API. And so we actually have to tailor the price flooring strategy to each partner based on what their capabilities are.

CH: Have you found a dropping off point with regards to latency based upon the number of partners you bring in?

CM: I haven’t thought about that in terms of too many partners or too few partners. We look at it more in terms of the incremental impact of any given partner. And so if adding one more partner causes latency to go up, and that last incremental partner is not worth it, then we would drop them. But we are not philosophical about the number of partners that we run. And the impact on the site can vary tremendously from partner to partner. Some partners load a lot of Javascript, gather a lot of custom data, and then only after doing that, submit their bid. Other partners are much faster and easier to work with. To Sovrn’s credit, you guys have provided a great API that makes it very easy to request a bid. It’s very lightweight. We can bundle the bid request into one request rather than having to send out individual requests for each adding on the page. And so requesting a bid from Sovrn is fast and easy.

For others, it’s more difficult. But to get back to the question of how many partners is the right amount or too many. Since the concern is about the impact on the page and the impact on the auction, each partner actually has very different profiles in terms of how much they impact the page, how much they impact the auction. So just adding one bad partner could be worse than adding 10 extremely good partners. No exaggeration.

CH: We talked about header bidding, it’s a been big growth opportunity for publishers in 2016. In order to keep a revenue growth trajectory, what other strategies are you going to use in 2017?

CM: I think that the number of companies that want to compete in the header is going to continue to grow. We’ve already seen some agencies and marketers want to get into the header directly. I think that there will continue to be more demand on the marketer side to be in the header on publishers, and that will drive growth.

I’m also hopeful that improvements in header bidding technology will allow the auctions to run faster, the bids to return quicker, and the ads to render quicker. And then that will lead to revenue gains as well. We’ve seen that if an auction takes a couple seconds to run and then it takes another couple seconds for the ad to load, by the time the ad’s rendered on the site, we could have lost 5% to 10% of our revenue because the ad was slow to load. I’d really like to gain that 5% to 10% of our revenue back this year by having ads that are fast.

CH: Do you think S2S is a technology that will compensate for that?

CM: I think there are great aspects of server-to-server integrations that can help reduce the page load and provide faster bid response times. But the coordination challenge of getting different players in the industry to integrate with each other is huge. And everybody is skeptical of everybody else’s server-to-server approach because no matter how many times they say it’s going to be fair and even, it’s not as equal as if you’re a header bidder. And at the same time, it’s actually not that bad to run header bidding in the publisher’s site if you have fast bid request and bid responses.

I would love to see server-to-server integrations, where everybody bids quickly. It lightens the page load, and we get all our partners on there. I just think that’s going to take a long time for it to materialize. And in the meantime, we don’t want to leave all the revenue on the table that could be had from just having better header bidding experience here and now.

CH: Let’s talk about PubNation since I heard from other publishers that you created the ad quality solution from frustrations you had with slow and bad ads impacting your users experience. What specific concerns do you see right now in terms of the improving the customer’s experience and reducing or eliminating the bad ads and slow ads?

CM:  Yes, these problems are front and center for publishers. We continue to see video ads coming through banners. We see display ads that download hundreds of requests and take up 5 to 10 megabytes of bandwidth just to show the display ad. We see ads that redirect users or point them to scammy, fake news websites. Programmatic ads are a tremendous boon for publisher revenue, but they have created more ad quality problems than ever before.

One of the reasons why I think we’ve been able to expand so rapidly with programmatic and with header bidding is because I believe we have better ad quality controls than most of the industry. Those two go hand-in-hand. We could not have achieved our revenue growth if we did not have the ad quality control processes that we do. We’ve shut off partners because of ad quality problems or significantly reduce the amount of business we do with partners because of ad quality problems.

On the flip side, for some partners, we’ve done a lot more business because they have such good ad quality. Since we now have visibility and control over what’s appearing on the site, it makes us much more willing to try out that incremental header bidder because if they have ad quality problems, we’ll know about it. We can take them down or take action on them.

CH: If I’m a publisher that’s having these issues, what are two or three ways that I can alleviate these issues?

CC: Use PubNation is a great answer, but more generally, I think it’s very difficult to manage what you can’t measure. Whether you use PubNation or not, you need to get a tool in place that lets you measure ad quality. And there are a number of different types of ad quality problems that arise, things that slow down the page, redirect the users, play videos, and you need a way of identifying whether these problems are happening on the site. Once you can measure them, it’s much easier to take action on them. So that’s maybe the most important thing is measure it so you can manage it.

After measuring it, the next biggest challenge that we’ve seen is that for people that work with multiple sources of programmatic demand, it can be very challenging for them to know where an ad came from. There’s a lot of complexity in programmatic tags, and that complexity is only magnified once people move to header bidding. I think after measuring ad quality generally, the next step is to measure it specifically by partner so that you can attribute different problematic ads to their source.

The third thing is to have somebody who’s directly accountable for quality. I think right now, for a lot of publishers, it’s a game of finger pointing. The engineers are saying, “Oh, the site is slow,” and they point at the revenue team. Revenue team is saying, “We’re just trying to make money, and we have no visibility into what’s fast or slow. All we see are CPMs.” And so they feel like they have no power to address the quality problems. And I think that smart publishers are increasingly making somebody accountable for ad quality so that if there’s a problem, they know who to go to get resolution and to get help.

CH: Personally, I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. There are so many questionable sites and bad ads coming in from questionable sources, and programmatic is supposed to grow even more in the next couple of years.

Okay, one last question. At the Tech Forum last year, I talked to your team about their internal ad op processes. Could you recommend two to three things ad ops managers can do to streamline and improve their day-to-day chaos?

CM: Sure. I think number one is to automate reporting. The complexity of working with multiple programmatic partners and trying to pull reports about how much revenue, to answer you on a simple question, how much money did we make yesterday? For a lot of publishers, that’s like an hour-long analysis. And it’s so long that you just don’t do it. You do it on a weekly or monthly basis. We’ve seen over the last couple of years massive improvements in our ability to operate by changing that from an hour-long process to a four-second process. And for us, we’ve actually moved to running all of our programmatic through header bidding. For the most part, we don’t do any tag-based networks. And what that means is that when we gather information for most of our partners on what they’re bidding, we’re able to get real-time revenue about on the site. There are couple areas where we have to estimate or fill in some gaps, but by and large, we’re able to get a pretty good approximation of what’s happening in real time, and that’s been a game changer for us. When we run experiments, we can see what’s happening on the site. When we want to pull report on the revenue, it’s dead simple.

You can use a variety of tools to collect this data and report on this data. We built a way of storing the data in Amazon Redshift, which is a data warehouse. And then we used a business intelligence tool called Looker to run reports on top of it. We talked to a lot of publishers that have different ways of storing the data and reporting on the data. But I think that’s probably the most important thing is to automate the reporting, because again, if you can’t measure it, it’s difficult to manage it.

That’s been a huge time saver. But also, more importantly, it’s helped us drive more insights that helps us make more money. A lot of people talk about the cost of the reporting in terms of how long does it take for a person, an analyst to go pool the report and put together the data. And that’s only, you know, 20% of the value. Eighty percent of the value is in the insight you’re able to get by having real-time information and running experiments and seeing how it impacts revenue. So I think that’s probably number one thing to streamline operations.

Another one is that as we’ve added more partners. So if we run 15 header bidders, we probably work with 25, maybe 30 different partners over the course of the year. And keeping track of all the partners when we talk to them what the terms are, you know, payments, it’s just a lot to keep track of that many different vendors. Consequently, we’ve set up a database to keep track of everybody that we work with in all the key points of information for each of our vendors, and that’s been really helpful, too. We use a tool called SalesforceIQ.

The third is our emphasis on ad quality. Internally, we’ve had more emphasis on ad quality this year than ever before, and it’s been a huge enabler of expanding into that programmatic demand.

CH: Thank you Chris and Mike taking time to share you successes, processes and passion. I can’t wait for our community to learn from you in the upcoming AMA on February 1.

About Chris
Chris Cummings is the founder and CEO of Curiosity Media. He’s passionate about education, technology, entrepreneurship, and riding his electric skateboard to work.

You can follow him on Twitter: @christopherdc1.
About Mike
Mike Miller is the Director of Revenue and Analytics at SpanishDict.com. Before taking over this position, Mike was an engineer working on the company’s website and ad tech. In his current position, Mike works with a small team to manage all of the advertising on Spanishdict.com. All of the advertising revenue generated by the site comes from programmatic demand and the vast majority of that comes from the company’s 15 header bidding partners.

When I turned 30 this year I made a personal goal of learning how to play chess. Judging by the class I took, I might be the only person in the US older than 12 years old that is trying to do this.

The post Monetization Strategies & Ad Quality with Curiosity Media appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

However, until now publishers have utilized browser-side header bidding solutions, which can potentially contribute to ad-load and page-load latency.

Why browser-side header bidding causes latency

With browser or “client-side” header bidding, auctions are run and ads are called to the web page directly via multiple javascript operations. So many processes occurring can increase page load time.

This means that the more advertisers you have competing in your on-page header auction, the slower the ads load which can lead to overall slow loading pages and a bad user experience.

Server-side header bidding – Header Bidding 2.0

But publishers now have another option: off-page or server-side header bidding. Server-side header bidding is faster than browser-side because it allows the auction process to occur outside of the publisher’s web page and consolidates the ad calls.

How does it work?

Advertisers bid on inventory ahead of the ad server within an externally hosted auction, that calls ad inventory via a consolidated call process to the page. Page latency is greatly reduced.

But who hosts the header bidding server solution?

With server-side header bidding, the publisher chooses a server-side bidding technology partner to implement and host the solution. A few SSPs and Exchanges are working on these solutions already like Sovrn, Index. Google’s Exchange Bidding for Dynamic Allocation solution will also provide the performance benefits of server-side bidding.

Sovrn is currently beta testing it’s own server-side header bidding solution with select publishers. If you’re interested in beta-testing our server-side header bidding solution, contact us here.

The post How Does Server-Side Header Bidding Work? appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

On January 18, 11 a.m. MST, he’ll be LIVE for our first Sovrn Community Ask Me Anything (AMA). Please come with questions!

CH: Hi Gavin, I’ve been looking forward to this interview. Let’s get started.

First, let’s talk about 2017 trends. What do you see occurring in 2017? What are the concerns and opportunities ad tech professionals have for 2017?

GD: Well, first: invalid traffic. This concern was ramping up at the end of the year at our Publisher Forums and kind of shook the industry with the discovery of the damage wrought by “Methbot.” Invalid traffic will probably become a bigger deal than ad blocking. If anything, ad blocking has gone from full-blown crisis to an afterthought. (I’ll cover ad blocking later.)

Invalid traffic, on the other hand, is flowing in from all kinds of places all over the world. It’s even backed by organized crime in various countries. It’s a problem because it’s flooding open marketplaces (and reportedly some private), but agencies are giving premium publishers hell about it since they want to make sure all traffic they buy is authentic. Premium publishers, for the most part, are not the issue.

It’s another case where premium publishers are getting the brunt of an issue. However, technology is increasingly there to stop delivering ads to suspect traffic. It’s not 100% perfect, but I think in the next year, invalid traffic will go down as a concern. And hopefully we can move on to better things.

Viewability is the next trend I see for 2017. Viewability remains challenging on a lot of levels, but most of the issues stem from a buy side that is rigid and stringent. Many on the demand side don’t seem to understand the technology and the fact that you can’t measure every impression from a third-party standpoint.

The one trend that I’ve talked about a great deal over the last couple years is the idea of selling time on a guaranteed basis—a guaranteed amount of seconds and views.

We had a representative from The Financial Times come to our last Publisher Forum and explain the mechanics behind it. It is not easy to make it work. Your typical ad server is not set up to measure and forecast based on time. But it’s an intriguing possibility and I think it puts digital that much closer to being in line with TV measurements, which, of course, are all guaranteed based on time in view and in front of a specific audience.

But beyond those three trends for 2017, header bidding was the trend du jour in 2016 and it’s going to remain that way in 2017. But it is going to get interesting on a few levels. First of all, Google’s has partnered up with a lot more companies for its server-to-server-based Exchange Bidding Dynamic Allocation (EBDA).

CH: Yes, we just met with Google last week for EBDA.

GD: It makes sense for every demand source to partner up with Google on that. Just don’t hedge all your bets on it, because there are so many questions. As publishers have known for years with working with Double Click for Publishers (DFP), it’s not that easy to get answers out of Google.

CH: The publishers might lose their transparency that they have through header bidding.

GD: Yes—they won’t see all the bids coming in. They won’t know all the partners. At the end of the day, EBDA is a mediation platform. And one of the advantages of header bidding is you get so much data and so much insight into your demand sources. EBDA isn’t going to work the same or offer publishers nearly as much insight.

The other question is will it be set up like dynamic allocation (DA) was before—where Google’s ad exchange gets the last word? That was one of the problems with DA, and the factor that spurred the growth of header bidding. Theoretically, AdX could just throw in a higher bid at the last minute and screw over all the other people in the waterfall. Will they do the same in EBDA? They will have the power.

CH: Technology for server-to-server side (S2S) bidding is now a reality and ad ops pros are analyzing the benefits and challenges of adopting S2S solutions versus their header bidding solutions. What do you think are the main differences of each solution? Transparency, setup, page load latencies?

GD: S2S is interesting for a few reasons. Let me give an example. One company has the code in the header. They send data off to a server, and that server hits all the other demand sources. The other header companies, the demand sources, don’t have the code on the page anymore. And so they have to trust and rely on the one company to send all the information and run all the auctions. And while header companies are willing to play together a bit, that is taking it a little too far for most.

The other solution I’ve seen has been header-based server-to-server connections that serve as mediation platforms. It’s one company sending data off to their server, running a bunch of different auctions in their server and then sending it back.

So I see header-based mediation S2S as being advantageous for companies that are concerned about latency and don’t mind simpler header bidding setups, because you’re limiting yourself a bit. It’s kind of creating a new waterfall, except in the header. For certain companies, that’s fine. They’re more concerned about the latency and don’t have the developmental resources to manage a wrapper filled with 12 header bidding partners. It also depends on how much indirect sales you do.

Latency remains a huge issue in “traditional” header bidding, but advancements in bid architecture are changing the game. Forward-thinking header partners are now using single-request bid architecture. They’ve cut down on latency dramatically by sending out fewer calls.

However, S2S is still much faster because you’re taking all the weight out of the browser. It makes a lot of sense. I think both solutions are cool, and preferences are going to differ from publisher to publisher. There’s still enough space in this area for a variety of offerings.

CH: Last week, you were a moderator for the New York Yield Meetup. You talked about S2S site integrations, programmatic video, private marketplaces, and real-time guarantee. What were some insights you learned from the event that surprised you?

GD: It was pretty fascinating. It was great bunch of people: DailyMotion, CenterPoint Media, and Operative. It was especially interesting because Operative just announced an acquisition. They’ll be merging with another major order management system over the next year.

Programmatic video was a big focus because DailyMotion has a huge amount of inventory, and they sell the majority of it on a programmatic basis. They have had an interesting year because they were big partners with LiveRail.

When LiveRail shut down, Dailymotion had to almost start from scratch reconfiguring their monetization strategy. But they ended up finding a great group of partners and now actually have a smarter setup than before. Hey, sometimes when a company shuts down, good things can happen.

DailyMotion has had great experience with video private exchanges. They’re still concerned about the invalid traffic with the open exchanges. Same deal with CenterPoint Media, which advises both buy and sell side clients.

With Operative we got a couple of interesting comments about the potential for holistic yield management. Header bidding has opened the door for this by leveling the playing field among demand sources, but it doesn’t seem like the reporting tech has moved forward. It’s going to be up to companies like Operative, STAQ, and other reporting aggregators to up their game and build tools that can support holistic yield management before it becomes a true reality.

You might see some publishers that can do it on their own. But these are the publishers that have huge developmental resources—the ones that manage 12 header bidding partners in an customized open-source wrapper. Yeah, they’ve got the brains to do that.

The other interesting thing with order management systems (OMSs) is real-time guaranteed. This is another trend I think we’ll see advance next year. Already, you have people like OpenX, who are pushing out solutions. It’d be nice to see more flexibility that way. I also am curious if order management systems will be able to support real-time guaranteed—I think that will be a big hurdle.
CH: This is perfect and very comprehensive. Have you thought of publishing a book with all your knowledge?

GD: You know, I’ve had people over the years ask me, “Why don’t you write a book about this?” But the knowledge would be out of date in a year! Maybe only six months!

CH: Yes, online publishing is much better for you! Thank you for sharing your knowledge with our community. We’ll get to see which trends you predicted in 2017 come to fruition! Thanks again.

About Gavin:
As Editorial Director, Gavin Dunaway hunts down the topics on the top of ad operation pros’ minds and turns them into in-depth feature articles. Gavin is a frequent speaker and contributor for ad ops events across the US and has spoken on header bidding, server-to-server integrations, private marketplaces, programmatic video, real-time guarantee, and more. While he was born and raised just outside of Washington, DC, he currently resides in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn because he is an unrepentant, though aging, hipster. When not diligently producing news and feature articles related to ad ops, he enjoys playing guitar so loud that the walls shake.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: AdMonsterGavin
 

The post AdTech Projections for 2017: An Interview With Gavin Dunaway, Editorial Director at Admonsters appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

As many of you may already know, Google AdSense is a free advertisement placement service run by Google. It is used by a wide variety of publishers, but is best suited for long- to mid-tail sites.

Google AdExchange, or AdEx, is a programmatic real-time bidding exchange that was designed to help premium publishers sell their inventory to big brand advertisers. It is ideal for large sites that sell their advertising inventory directly.

There are a few key differences between AdSense and AdEx.

1. AdSense allows three ad units per page, while AdEx allows five.
2. AdEx allows publishers to set up Preferred Deals and PMPs, which are advertising deals with fixed CPM price floors. AdSense does not.
3. AdEx also allows for more filtering, including URL blocking, category blocking, and creative review, which allows publishers to approve or disapprove ads from advertisers.

And as a heads-up, If you’re using DFP, or DoubleClick for Publishers, Google’s ad management platform, you will still have to request access to AdExchange. Neither DFP Small Business nor DFP Premium automatically include AdX.

But, if your site is big enough to be approved by Google for DFP Premium, then you will probably want to sign up for Google AdX.

One important thing to note is that as a publisher, it is in your best interest to use multiple ad exchanges, whether you are using AdSense or AdExchange.

The post What’s the Difference Between Google AdSense and DoubleClick AdExchange? appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

How does real-time bidding work?

Real-time bidding is a computer-run auction that allows advertisers to compete to serve targeted ads to their desired customers.

The ads are generated based off of the user’s cookies, based on the user’s cookie history. This helps advertisers target the audiences interested in their products.

To make these bidding decisions, advertisers use technology that combines information about the webpage as well as the user. The URL, content category of the page, location of the ad space, and the user’s browser cookies all affect how much an advertiser is willing to pay to serve an ad.

Real-time bidding is typically the most cost-effective form of programmatic advertising. However, it offers the least precision for both publishers and advertisers. Out of all forms of programmatic advertising, RTB is the largest – billions and billions of impressions are served each day. This is where most programmatic buying happens, because there are thousands and thousands of advertisers are competing for RTB inventory.

How do PMPs work?

PMP stands for Private Marketplace. Private Marketplace Deals are invitation-only real-time bidding auctions where one or several publishers invite a select number of advertisers to buy their inventory.

With PMP deals, the advertiser cuts out the middleman and skip over the exchanges and service-side platforms all together. Advertisers also get access to premium sites for cheaper than they would with programmatic direct. The advertisers also know exactly which sites their ads will run on.

PMPs are usually facilitated with an IO, or Insertion Order. This is a contract that spells out how much the buyers are willing to pay for the inventory and how long the ads with run.

The CPM is usually not a fixed CPM, meaning the advertisers don’t pay a CPM agreed upon in advance.

PMPs and Programmatic direct have a few different advantages for pubs and buyers. Publishers are more aware of who is serving ads on their sites, and they can sell the space for more money. But in order to justify paying more, buyers want preferential access to the supply. They basically want to find their target audience before their competitors.

How does programmatic direct work?

Programmatic direct is slightly different to PMP deals. Programmatic Direct is direct-sold, guaranteed inventory, that unlike PMP deals doesn’t require human intervention to run.

However, Programmatic Direct is actually a more manual process than PMP deals.

This is because deals are made on an individual basis, where a publisher’s sales rep negotiates the arrangement with the advertiser on a one-to-one basis.

With Programmatic Direct, the advertiser purchases a fixed CPM, meaning the advertiser agrees to paid a predetermined CPM.

Programmatic Direct is a good choice for brands focused on brand safety, as the relationship is one-to-one and the brands know exactly where their ads will appear. Learn more about programmatic direct buying from this resource.

A metaphor for understanding the difference between RTB, PMPs and programmatic direct

So to summarize, here’s a way to conceptualize the flow from Open RTB to PMP to direct.

The open market (RTB) has thousands of advertisers and millions of sites in it. When buyers are looking for very specific people, that’s difficult. Think of a huge farmer’s market with thousands of farmers and thousands of buyers, and you’re a buyer looking for the perfect apples. You know you’re looking for big, green, organic, and ripe. You can find a good one, but the odds of you actually finding the perfect apple aren’t great.

So now you can pay extra to go into the VIP area where only the best apple farmers are, but the cheapest apple is $5. You can now find the apple you want, but you’re still competing with all the other buyers to find the one you want. At least your odds are better. This is equivalent to PMPs.

But you really want this perfect apple, and you know which farmer has it. He says he will give you the perfect apple for $10, but he will deliver it to your house and skip the farmer’s market and price haggling altogether. This is how programmatic direct works.

The post What’s the Difference Between RTB, PMPs and Programmatic Direct? appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

“We started header bidding in March 2015, and out of the gate we saw gains of around 30%. We’ve continued to see gains throughout the past year. We can confidently say our revenue has increased more than 40% since we started header bidding.” – AJ Okereke, Head of Revenue Technology, Graphiq

Graphiq, formerly FindTheBest, is a data aggregation and visualization company that manages more than 20 vertical search engines. Since March 2016, Sovrn has been one of Graphiq’s eight header bidding partners.

“From a revenue share of voice, Sovrn is definitely top three in our stack,” says AJ Okereke, Head of Revenue Technology at Graphiq. “With Sovrn, revenue per visit increased by 5% on average. You all definitely bring premium CPMs and make our overall auction extremely competitive, which we love.”

Graphiq hasn’t just seen great results with Sovrn revenue-wise – they have also experienced excellent customer service.

“Sovrn’s account management team is pretty stellar – they are very responsive and on-time,“ says Okereke.

In addition to Sovrn’s account management, Graphiq has been pleased with Sovrn’s header bidding development team. “From a development perspective, not many header bidding partners have the opportunity to provide full-time dev. Sovrn ad operations has been able to break down different sets of reporting and has been very responsive to our requests.”

And as for monetization strategies going forward?

Graphiq’s number-one priority is undoubtedly header bidding.

“We’re testing a few more header bidding partners as we’re currently at eight full partners. Once we get to 10, there’s a lot of interesting strategies we’ve been discussing,” says Okereke. We’re looking to further optimize our meta auction and continue to make AdX work hard for every impression that they win.”

Going forward, Graphiq is also looking to explore dynamic price floors. In doing this, Graphiq plans to optimize AdX so all header bidding partners have a chance to compete.

“We’re looking into passing in price floors dynamically within our bid requests and/or potentially playing around with different AdX flooring strategies that will be beneficial for us, and force AdX to work harder for each impression that they win.”

As Google scrambles to counter the header bidding craze, it is yet to be seen whether websites will revert back to traditional pricing tiers. However, it seems Graphiq will stay true to course with header bidding.

“We’re pretty comfortable with the current setup that we have,” says Okereke. “The current setup with header bidding gives us a lot of visibility into information that we previously did not have within DFP. To revert back to that black box strategy would probably not be advantageous to us.”

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Header Bidding DFP Setup: Planning

1. Which ad units are going to be eligible for header bidding? Do you want all of your ad units to eligible or only certain ones? Note which ones you want to use, you will need this later.
2. How many of these ad units are eligible to appear on a page at any given time, and what size creatives are eligible to serve to these ad units?
3. Which page on your site has the max number of ad units? Do you have two 728x90s, a 300×600 and a 300×250? Note your sizes and the max number you’re dealing with. You’ll most likely want to set up your line items to be flexible enough to serve to multiple ad units and sizes on your page rather than limiting by an ad unit or a size to give you the max revenue for that page view.

As part of your planning process, take a look at setting up your line items. When you’re setting up your line items, the plan is to set up one line item from start to finish, then create copies of this primary line item. That said, your first line item must be set up perfectly before moving on so you don’t create extra work for yourself down the road.

Creating a Placement

It’s good practice to start by creating a placement. Group your ad units together in the placement, and when you’re setting up a line item target the placement and any sizes you might want to add in the future along with your current sizes. If you know you’re going to want to add another mobile unit in the next few quarters, for example, go ahead and target that new size when you set up your heading bidding line item. This will lessen the work for you later on since once your line items are created you’d have to edit anywhere from 50 to 1,000 line items whenever you make a change. Using a placement and trying to plan ahead is going to be easier for you in the long run.

Selecting Price Increments

Now, let’s talk about price increments. Large intervals, while they might be quick for initial set up, could under-prioritize your impressions. The smaller the interval the longer the set up, but a smaller increments more accurately prioritize by value. Many publishers create $0.01, $0.05 or $0.10 increments.

Pro-tip: Try $0.01 increments for price spans that make the most sense to you. For example, create $0.01 increments for your line items from $0.10 to $1.00, and then move to $0.05 or $0.10 increments for remaining line items depending on your header bidding partner.

With DFP, it’s important to note that there’s an imposed limit of 450 line items per order and 61,000 active line items. If you’re setting up multiple header bidding partners and you want $0.01 price increments from $0.00 to $10, you could run into a limit pretty quickly. Reach out to your Account Manager at DFP to increase your limit and accommodate your setup.

Key Value Creation

The first thing you’re going to do for Sovrn solution is set up your key value. That key is hb_pb, and the values are going to be from $0.00 to whatever your max amount is at your desired increments.

In this example on the screen, we have zero dollars. I think this goes through 10 and it’s at 10 cent increments, so I just went in Excel and did a quick little formula to give me all those lines and copied and pasted over to get that done really quickly. Note that it should match exactly this format. You need hb_pb and 0.00. You need those two decimal places. You can’t say point one, point two. It has to match exactly what’s coming back when you hit the impression return.

Primary Line Item Creation

Next let’s create one line item. Again, we’re going to create this from start to finish perfectly the first time because you’re going to create a lot of copies, and if you make a mistake or forget something it could mean a lot of editing and a lot more work for you. This is already a long process.

Your naming convention should include the price span so you can easily see right there what line item and price span match up. You’re going to want to include all the inventory sizes for you ad units, so remember that 728×90, the 300×600, the 300×250, any additional ad units sizes you intend to add. Make sure you allow same advertiser exception checks. That’s for those of you who use labeling. It’s really important to make sure that you have that checked off so that more than one line item from Sovrn or your header bidding solutions, whoever you’re using, can serve on that page at the same time.

Allow an unlimited end date use price priority with no limits on impressions. Remember price priority is a way for us to keep everyone on an even playing field, so that’s the one we want to use.

Stick to one or more display creatives, not only one or not as many as possible or all to allow for ad exchange to compete dynamically with that line item. Your CPM for the line item should match your desired price span. If you’re starting at zero, this first line item will be zero. Remember, and again, if you’re using a different currency there’s going to be some exchange rates you have to use there. Your value CPM should match the value in that currency that equals the price span amount in dollars that we’re setting up.

Target your ad units or placement and the specific key values. For this first line item, again, it’s hb_pb = 0.00.

Adding Creatives

Once your very first line item is set up from start to finish it’s time to add creatives. For this, you can’t just pop into the creatives tab within the line item and add them. Go over to the creative side in the left hand side menu and click Creatives. Create a new creative with the same advertiser as on the order, name it clearly. You’re going to use the same snippet. Everybody uses the same snippet for all of your creatives, so you really only have to create this the one time.

Then target each ad unit size one by one. When you add the creative to the line item you will do a size override to allow it to serve to any of those sizes on the page. This tag isn’t really where the creative is coming from. It’s just a method for which the return creative can be filtered through DFP.

Now return to your line item. Use existing creatives for any size, then select show all to remove the creative size filtering. Find and add the creative that you just created, and use the size override to add all the sizes. For example, here we have the 300×250, 728×90, 320×50 and 97 x250 all added in here.

Save this creative and duplicate it for as many creatives as you need. Going back to our planning process of how many ad units will appear on a page at any given time, that’s how many creatives you’re going to want to have created. If you have two 728×90’s, a 300×600 and a 300×250 that’s four creatives. Copy the same creative and have it on there four times. You could also copy it an additional few times so that you have less work to do later if you add additional ad units or sizes to the page.

Mass Edits

Time to enter the mass edits phase. In this phase, review the line item and creative set up one more time to make sure everything is good to go, you’ve followed all of the instructions appropriately, everything looks great. Now create your copies. Your price span increments will inform how copies to make and also what CPM to go up to.

For this example, go up to $10. For tens in increments you’re looking at 101 line items, that’s zero all the way up through $10. At $0.01 increments that’s 1,001 line items. Just check the box and copy with creative, and create however many line items you need to achieve your price span goals.

The rest of the road is smooth sailing because we’ve added the creatives, we’ve already added all the sizes to just use that main order level screen where you can see all the line items to mass edit the name, the price spans, CPM and the targeting key value for each line item. Don’t forget to change that targeting key value from hb_pb 0.00 to 0.01 to 0.02.

Remember, you want to follow exactly the values that you have set up in your key value screen and that Sovrn header bidding is recommending for you. Once you’ve made all those edits, you’re good to go. As long as you have your development team has implemented everything they need to in the header on the site, you should start seeing impressions come back on those line items.

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A quick technical overview of header bidding

Before we jump into the specific elements involved in a header auction, let’s do a quick overview of the full process.

When a user visits the website, the header bidding script in the head of the web page “sees” this user and sends a request to all of the integrated partners (SSPs and exchanges) simultaneously. At this time, each partner initiates an auction with their DSPs. The DSPs then return their bids for the impression and the winning bid is returned to the ad server so the ad server can determine the final line item to serve. The marketer’s ad server is called with the final line item and the ad creative is returned via CDN and loaded on the page. Notice that the workflow of this process is very similar to that of a waterfall except all of the partners are called simultaneously instead of routing the call through a number of passbacks from partner to partner.

Header bidding elements and their roles in the auction

Bidder – a bidder is simply a partner that is equipped to receive requests and send bids via a header bidding implementation. This could be a supply-side platform (SSP), ad network, retargeted, etc. There are now over twenty different ad tech companies that have their own “bidder.” It is best practice to work with at least 6-8 different bidders in a healthy header auction in order to increase competition for inventory.

Header bidding wrapper or container – A piece of Javascript that “wraps” together ad requests and bids in the <head></head> section of a website. Within 500-1000 milliseconds, the container sorts these bids and selects the winner. The wrapper organizes all partner bids and applies auction logic and key values to returns bids.

Header bidding mediation – Mediation is the main job of the wrapper or container code. The wrapper code asynchronously calls all bidders, collects their bids and determines a winning bid before the ad server ever gets involved (thus the terms “pre-bidding” or “advance bidding”, early terms used for header bidding).

Header bidding adaptor – Partner-specific code that allows them to communicate with the wrapper to receive requests and return bids to the auction.

Timeout – Header auctions must be completed within a very small window so they do not negatively impact page latency. Most wrappers, most notably Prebid.js, have timeout settings that allow a publisher to determine how long the auction should wait for each partner to return a bid before closing the auction.

Ad server – The winning bids from header bidding auctions are sent along to the publisher’s ad server  to select the appropriate line item and return the winning creative to the correct zone on the page. For most publishers using DFP, the winning bid must also compete against AdX dynamic allocation at that time.

Key values – When bids are received, the wrapper code adds the price and creative identifier to the ad server’s call as a set of query string parameters. This process is called key value targeting.

Header bidding line items – Line items are setup to target specific bid prices, allowing the bidders’ programmatic demand to compete with other line items based on price. The winning bid is then matched to the corresponding line item in order to select the correct creative to return to the page.

Ad creative – The actual ad asset (an image file) that is returned to the page which extracts and displays the ad from the bids returned via the header code.

To learn more about how all of these elements work together in symphony each time a page is loaded, check out this video with Sovrn’s header bidding guru, Tony Casson.

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