Optimization Techniques for Increasing Spend on Your Exchange

We previously discussed a few ways that publisher services and sales teams at exchanges can use our interactive analytics to optimize their publishing partners performance. In this post, we will shift gears and focus on how demand services and sales teams at exchanges can drive more spend through effective buyer monitoring, inventory merchandising, PMP opportunity discovery, and unclaimed inventory analysis.

 

Monitoring Buyer Trends

Buyer teams can use the Explore Dashboard to quickly identify where major increases and decreases in spend are occurring. By sorting on absolute change, you can quickly see which DSPs are spending more this week compared to last week, but more importantly those who are spending less.

 

 

In this example, RubiMe and JarMeld have the largest decreases in spend week-over-week. You will want to dig in deeper to investigate the potential causes by jumping over to the Facet Dashboard and adding splits for “adomain” and “campaign id” to see what underlying buyers are driving the spend decrease.

 

 

With all these insights in hand, you can proactively reach out to buyers to see whether the campaigns you have identified as causes of spend decreases are ending, performing poorly, or if there is more budget coming into those campaigns down the line.

 

Inventory Merchandising

Before utilizing Metamarkets, most exchanges had to send inventory availability spreadsheets to their buyers on a monthly basis. By extending our dashboards to your buyers, you make it easy for buyers to see how much inventory is available for their target parameters, what price they can expect to pay, and how it performs over time. Enabling this type of transparency to your buyers allows them to properly plan their programmatic campaigns and commit to budgets with confidence.

Let’s say a buyer was curious about inventory available with the following parameters:

Ad Size: 320 x 50   Country: US & UK    Device Model: iPhones

 

 

In a few simple clicks you can quickly determine the audience size in the past week is 339 million uniques, with 10.7 billion available auctions. The Avg Winning Bid is 1.94, but on average these impressions transact at 0.55. In general there is reasonable demand with an average bid depth of 1.35. Finally, I can see the inventory has a 0.60% click through, which is well above the industry standard.

Now let’s say a buyer only wants to target apps with high CTR – you could quickly jump over to the Facet Dashboard and use the weighted sort feature to eliminate low volume apps. Then, you can send this app/site list off to your buyer so they can properly optimize for their next campaigns.

 

 

There’s often a significant amount of inventory from exchanges that nobody bids on. There could be a number of reasons why, but this presents an interesting opportunity for buyers. A quick way to figure out what inventory wasn’t bid on is to filter by “auction outcome” with “no bids” on the Explore Dashboard.

 

 

You can quickly see there’s a lot of inventory without competitive demand, allowing any buyer to be the sole bidder and perhaps pay a discounted CPM if they decide their is opportunity to utilize this inventory for a campaign.

Finding PMP Opportunities

Periodically revisiting blocked advertiser lists can present major opportunity for buyers. Overtime, publishers might not even be aware who they have blocked and if that block is still applicable for specific apps/sites. By filtering by “blocked advertiser” on the Explore Dashboard you can quickly identify which advertisers have the most blocked bids over the last few days.

 

 

In this example, blocked advertiser Coca-Cola has had their bid blocked 333 million times over the past few days on the app ManticSimpli. Perhaps this publisher has a direct deal with Coca-Cola, but at $2.22 per bid this is still a major opportunity!

The next step would be to reach out to the publisher account manager and see if the publisher is willing to remove the advertiser block. If not, perhaps they’d be willing to put a floor in place at the direct negotiated price or create a PMP. Either way, there’s plenty of opportunity for buyers to reach the audience they’re looking for and for publishers to increase yield.

 

There are a number of additional use-cases that our Account Management team is happy to discuss during more formal training sessions, so please give us a shout!