The Benefits of Sharing Your Metamarkets Dashboards: Transparency Drives Liquidity
March 8th, 2017 Jason Richman
It is safe to say that programmatic marketplaces are some of the most complex in the world – with more than 600 billion transactions daily, programmatic markets see about 100 times as many transactions as the New York Stock Exchange (6 billion). What’s more, each programmatic transaction can include close to 100 fields, compared with about 10 fields per NYSE trade. This level of data scale and complexity presents many challenges to both buyers and sellers in the media world.
The challenges that ad-technologists face today draw many parallels to those of the High-Frequency Traders (HFT) in Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys. In each case, complicated technology integrations and a lack of real-time information prevent market transactions from being executed at their highest potential.
In a 2015 survey of 40 programmatic buyers, 42% of respondents said they regularly get data from exchanges through spreadsheet attachments. 55% said it was a challenge to aggregate all the data they needed from exchanges, and 52% said it was too difficult for them to explore their data to collect insights. The impact of these challenges is significant: programmatic buyers (DSPs, ATDs) are throttling their programmatic spending because they do not have an efficient way to forecast and plan their campaigns.
So, where does Metamarkets fit into this? As illustrated in the image above, our goal is to combat this “big data challenge” by helping exchanges leverage Explore, our interactive real-time analytics product, to help their buyers reach optimal levels of demand. By exposing their buyers to key pieces of their programmatic data, companies like Twitter, AOL, & The Rubicon Project have been able to increase fill rates, lift eCPMs, and drive revenue for their internal teams and buyers.
A key part of solving these challenges is allowing exchanges to expand access to their data to an ever-growing network of DSPs. While we have invested heavily in user-management & data security, we allow our exchange clients to take control of their data and permission it to their own clients as they see fit while monitoring various degrees of transparency. In addition to serving dozens of marketplaces, Metamarkets serves hundreds of DSPs and has become the de-facto standard for demand-side reporting in programmatic marketplaces.
How does this work? DSPs that receive an Explore dashboard from their SSP/Exchange channels typically have two views into that respective marketplace. The first is the Auctions (Avails) view – this view enables Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and Agency Trading Desks (ATDs) to increase media spend by gaining granular visibility into how much inventory exists for their current and upcoming campaigns, including real-time pricing and traffic monitoring.
The second view is the Bids view – this view enables DSPs and ATDs to better optimize their bidding activity on various inventory channels to monitor deals, improve win rates, and request more traffic.
The end result is a much smoother, oiled machine of programmatic buying with transparent access to data for all parties in the transaction. As media buyers shift more budget towards programmatic, demand for interactive analytics of auction-level reporting will grow exponentially. This is ultimately a win/win as buyers can spend with more confidence, and exchanges can achieve higher liquidity for their publishers.
If you are a DSP looking to receive access to these real-time analytics on your programmatic data, or an exchange looking at how to provide more transparency to your clients, please reach out to us – we’d love to chat about the many benefits of sharing your dashboards.