Closing the ‘Visibility Gap’ In Programmatic Advertising

Over the past two months, we’ve surveyed more than 30 major programmatic buyers about their workflows for planning and optimizing spends. The discussions revealed that these processes have become increasingly difficult as the volume of marketplace data has swelled and exchanges have retained old reporting practices. We’ve released a white paper with the findings, which you can download here.

Here are some of the highlights:

• 55% of buyers said that it was a challenge to aggregate all the data they needed from exchanges, and 42% said they regularly get data from exchanges via spreadsheet attachments.
• 55% said it takes too long to pull complex queries (i.e. search for audiences by multiple dimensions), and 52% said it was too difficult to explore the data for insights (i.e. slicing/dicing/applying filters).

These difficulties have produced what we call the ‘visibility gap,’ and its repercussions are felt across the industry: throttled spends, lower auction competition, lower fill rates, and reduced revenue for publishers.

What makes this issue particularly unique is that some in the industry aren’t sure why we still need to continue to invest in reporting. After all, isn’t this the era of algorithms and automation?  Yes, but people are still an important part of the process. Even the most sophisticated machines need humans to direct and monitor them, and humans need data given to them in ways that make it easier to extract insights.

The exchanges leading the charge to close the visibility gap stand to reap disproportionate benefits for their clients. Download the report to read our complete findings.