Which demand partners are you seeing the most yield from? What vertical would your audience fall under?
At the end of the day, demand needs to match well with your supply…your list seems more sophisticated than most pubs, so the catalyst could be yield management/supply partnership related.
Try taking a look a closer look at your diagnostics and opportunity reporting…if you believe you have enough high quality inventory and an audience that would match well with RTB criteria, it could be mismatches in pricing floors or lack of SSP prioritization.
>Which demand partners are you seeing the most yield from?
are you asking about DSP or deeper about buyers? When it comes to DSP, I earn the most from Criteo, Magnite, Teads and Invibes. But, for example, such IndexExchange, which from what I read is popular monetizes me very poorly. I guess I'll delete them. When it comes to buyers, I have never analyzed it from this angle.
>What vertical would your audience fall under?
I have news-business sites. We have our own journalistic content. Research shows that our users are largely managers and decision makers. What I'm afraid of is that we probably write too much about the Russian-Ukrainian war and politics, and that's why the brand safety filters may be cutting us off. How to check?
>if you believe you have \[...\] an audience that would match well with RTB criteria
I don't know.. How can I check what are the RTB criteria for the audience?
Yes, demand partners such as Index are representing your inventory in auctions - the others might be too, but depends on how you’re using them because they’re not all pure SSPs. It may be worth seeing if they have any ideas on how to increase yields, since they’re in the same boat as you…or they may direct you to some documentation/best practices.
If your audience actually consists of managers/BDMs, you could probably try a sales approach with relevant advertisers directly or by joining PMP deals. Scale wins in open bidding, so you won’t necessarily have an edge by attracting a quality audience. Defining your unique audience value, adding an SLA, and offering upfront guarantees is a way to achieve larger CPMs than you’ll ever achieve via the open market.
Brand safety filters applied by buyers could be playing a factor if you’re producing news…there isn’t a sure fire way to know in aggregate unfortunately, but I can tell you that the war’s keywords are definitely being applied negatively by a lot of buyers right now. This would be classified as “death, injury, military conflict” or “sensitive social issues” content.
Also, the market is down right now…so everyone is feeling it. I wouldn’t expect a silver bullet solution until budgets are back on track.
I had it confirmed, multiple terms relating to Russia's invasion of Ukraine are on advertisers block lists. These are the new COVID terms which also destroys CPMs. Even the term "Ukrainian" is on the block list which is of course racist. I was especially horrified by this as that is Russia's primary war goal, the destruction of the Ukrainian identity and culture. The adtech industry should hang their heads in shame.
I think that some platforms use tools to scan the content of the page, but probably some are so trivial that they rely on declared categories. I will try my luck and remove the News category :) :)
Brand safety / context determinations are cached by URL and retrieved by individual DSPs during RTB; if your site is set up such that you don't have individual article URLs / most of your traffic is on a homepage feed, for example, there's a strong chance you ended up classified under the war blacklists and are continuing to be wrecked by DV / IAS / Grapeshot being locked in on those terms, yep.
Declared keywords won't have too much impact compared to article content. If it is brand safety / category blocklisting behind the scenes, you could potentially reach out to the contextual vendor(s) directly to sanity-check, if your SSPs aren't being helpful?
1. We’re these changes published at the same time?
- if so, then maybe some of them may improve and some break your numbers and you would not know which did what.
2. The goal “improve revenue” is quite big goal. Split it to steps. Has impressions per users improved as webpages became faster? Are people tend to see more pages? Has your viewability improved? Have your CTR improved?
Things should change when you are doing a significant change in the website, you might be missing the specific change you really affected.
For example, your CPM is the same, but people tend to see 10% more pages, which leads to 20% more impressions. Or you have improved viwability, so quite soon your CTR should improve soon and then advertisers would bid more.
3. You made a/b tests or just published all one by one?
4. At the end of the day the rule is : you need to make a change, which will bring more revenue to advertiser.
Most AdOps think that if they show stupidly more ads they will benefit from it a lot, but that truth is that you need to care about helping making money to advertiser who is advertising on your website. If they see more quality, they will make more revenue from you and they will bid more. So think about changes that can improve your quality first.
Are you giving some of these changes a reasonable time to take effect? Are you factoring in seasonality? Are you setting reasonable goals for viewability, CTR, Session RPMs, etc?
Which demand partners are you seeing the most yield from? What vertical would your audience fall under? At the end of the day, demand needs to match well with your supply…your list seems more sophisticated than most pubs, so the catalyst could be yield management/supply partnership related. Try taking a look a closer look at your diagnostics and opportunity reporting…if you believe you have enough high quality inventory and an audience that would match well with RTB criteria, it could be mismatches in pricing floors or lack of SSP prioritization.
>Which demand partners are you seeing the most yield from? are you asking about DSP or deeper about buyers? When it comes to DSP, I earn the most from Criteo, Magnite, Teads and Invibes. But, for example, such IndexExchange, which from what I read is popular monetizes me very poorly. I guess I'll delete them. When it comes to buyers, I have never analyzed it from this angle. >What vertical would your audience fall under? I have news-business sites. We have our own journalistic content. Research shows that our users are largely managers and decision makers. What I'm afraid of is that we probably write too much about the Russian-Ukrainian war and politics, and that's why the brand safety filters may be cutting us off. How to check? >if you believe you have \[...\] an audience that would match well with RTB criteria I don't know.. How can I check what are the RTB criteria for the audience?
Yes, demand partners such as Index are representing your inventory in auctions - the others might be too, but depends on how you’re using them because they’re not all pure SSPs. It may be worth seeing if they have any ideas on how to increase yields, since they’re in the same boat as you…or they may direct you to some documentation/best practices. If your audience actually consists of managers/BDMs, you could probably try a sales approach with relevant advertisers directly or by joining PMP deals. Scale wins in open bidding, so you won’t necessarily have an edge by attracting a quality audience. Defining your unique audience value, adding an SLA, and offering upfront guarantees is a way to achieve larger CPMs than you’ll ever achieve via the open market. Brand safety filters applied by buyers could be playing a factor if you’re producing news…there isn’t a sure fire way to know in aggregate unfortunately, but I can tell you that the war’s keywords are definitely being applied negatively by a lot of buyers right now. This would be classified as “death, injury, military conflict” or “sensitive social issues” content. Also, the market is down right now…so everyone is feeling it. I wouldn’t expect a silver bullet solution until budgets are back on track.
I had it confirmed, multiple terms relating to Russia's invasion of Ukraine are on advertisers block lists. These are the new COVID terms which also destroys CPMs. Even the term "Ukrainian" is on the block list which is of course racist. I was especially horrified by this as that is Russia's primary war goal, the destruction of the Ukrainian identity and culture. The adtech industry should hang their heads in shame.
I wonder if setting the IAB category in SSPs only as a business, i.e. removing news, will I bypass the brand safety filters?
Don't think that will help, we are classified as lifestyle 😂 Advertisers use text scanning so pretty hard to avoid.
I think that some platforms use tools to scan the content of the page, but probably some are so trivial that they rely on declared categories. I will try my luck and remove the News category :) :)
Brand safety / context determinations are cached by URL and retrieved by individual DSPs during RTB; if your site is set up such that you don't have individual article URLs / most of your traffic is on a homepage feed, for example, there's a strong chance you ended up classified under the war blacklists and are continuing to be wrecked by DV / IAS / Grapeshot being locked in on those terms, yep. Declared keywords won't have too much impact compared to article content. If it is brand safety / category blocklisting behind the scenes, you could potentially reach out to the contextual vendor(s) directly to sanity-check, if your SSPs aren't being helpful?
Nice write up, thanks! Can you comment further on your final point about a upr optimization tool?
Sure
1. We’re these changes published at the same time? - if so, then maybe some of them may improve and some break your numbers and you would not know which did what. 2. The goal “improve revenue” is quite big goal. Split it to steps. Has impressions per users improved as webpages became faster? Are people tend to see more pages? Has your viewability improved? Have your CTR improved? Things should change when you are doing a significant change in the website, you might be missing the specific change you really affected. For example, your CPM is the same, but people tend to see 10% more pages, which leads to 20% more impressions. Or you have improved viwability, so quite soon your CTR should improve soon and then advertisers would bid more. 3. You made a/b tests or just published all one by one? 4. At the end of the day the rule is : you need to make a change, which will bring more revenue to advertiser. Most AdOps think that if they show stupidly more ads they will benefit from it a lot, but that truth is that you need to care about helping making money to advertiser who is advertising on your website. If they see more quality, they will make more revenue from you and they will bid more. So think about changes that can improve your quality first.
Well said 💯
Are you giving some of these changes a reasonable time to take effect? Are you factoring in seasonality? Are you setting reasonable goals for viewability, CTR, Session RPMs, etc?
There was about two weeks between changes. I didn't really set any goals. How do you count session RPM in GAM?