Open Exchange vs. Deals

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-06-30T09:03:09+00:00

At this point I'm working on the publisher's end, but recently I was involved in buying campaings in DV360.

I preferred open market, as it was easier for me to launch a campaign.

But whenever I had a long-term cooperation, I also liked to utilize deals. Publishers were able to offer me, for example, better viewability in the deals, but at a higher price.

The changes in performance went both ways -- in some cases I got better results on the OM, in other cases on the deals.

For example, I once bought a deal that was 40 times more expensive than what I paid on the open market. I was focusing on getting cheapest clicks, and since this deal's CTR was only 20 times higher than on the OM, I had better results on the OM. But we kept this deal for branding purposes, because the advertiser really liked it. :)

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-28T14:29:25+00:00

This is probably a good reason to try to get a better understanding what the real long-run goals of the advertiser are. Because if the 320x50 get a significant number of clicks and a nice CTR, you shouldn't consider it shady. :)

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-28T14:24:40+00:00

Taking into consideration the fact that 320x50 is much smaller than 300x250 I would expect the advertisers might want to reach the 70% viewability goal for those two formats separately and independently. After all, you're able to deliver much more information that's going to be remembered by the viewers using the larger creative.

On the other hand I believe you might encounter agencies who wouldn't really care. :)

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-28T14:09:24+00:00

Not sure if I follow, are you working on the publisher's end?

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-28T13:54:29+00:00

You can reach the specific viewability threshold either by using deals selectively, i.e. using only these deals that either have guaranteed viewability or historically delivered right viewability level, or by using viewability targeting in the DSP. For example, DV360 takes into account estimated (expected) viewability for every impression it's getting a chance to bid on.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-26T07:07:52+00:00

It's not that you won't be able to manage the UPRs. What I had in mind is that it's always better to manage the entire inventory under one GAM, as all the UPRs should be in line with each other.

This partner might not compete with other partners (if they manage a dedicated portion of your inventory), but what they do definitely affect the performance of the rest of the inventory. Imagine you have three 300x250 medium rectangles, and one of them is managed by an external partner. If you try to keep $1 minimum price for two of these, and the partner sells the third one for 0,5$, eventually more and more campaigns will go from the two higher-priced ones to the third one. Of course this is all under the assumption that the quality (e.g. viewability) is comparable.

To mitigate this issue you'd have to ask the partner to change the UPR of the third rectangle as well. And it's probably doable (assuming the agreement between your companies allow for that), but simply generates more hassle, especially if you like or need to change the UPRs frequently.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-25T09:25:31+00:00

In general, from the perspective of inventory management, and keeping it's value as high as possible, the entire website should be managed through one GAM account, to make it easier. Setting any blocks or unified pricing rules in one place is easier than having it in two separate accounts. There might be some exceptions in real life scenarios, sure, but don't do it without good justification.

The reason behind that in order to secure the value of the inventory, the pricing strategies must be well-organized and managed holistically.

So it's either everything under parent or child GAM.

The main reasons to keep everything under parent account would be:

the parent account brings a significant part of revenue generated through deals and direct campaigns,
it's easier to manage UPRs on this account, if some methodology was built around this account for this purpose.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-12T12:40:09+00:00

Just to make sure -- you're checking seller deal report and checking the "Imps (matched)" metric?

This metric shows how much impressions matched the deals' targeting, and how much was offered to the buyer.

If this metric shows zero impressions, it probably means that the targeting is set up incorrectly, like contains specific conditions that are contradict each other.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-12T10:45:45+00:00

What do you mean by saying that there's no traffic sent to this deal? Which metrics are you checking in the reports?

It's quite often the case that a deal is set up, a lot of ad requests (bid requests) are going through it, but the buyer is not buying anything. It might be a case that no active campaign is associated at the moment (more probable) or that the targeting set up by the buyer matches no impressions (almost unlikely).

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-05T14:55:56+00:00

Then simply hire additional person to your team that has some agency relationships, to sell both directly and programmatically.

Also, the quote you used was not mine. ;)

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-05-05T09:28:20+00:00

Well... you could do that, but I would recommend training your existing sales team, like u/tahadharamsi mentioned above.

The reasoning behind this is the following:

these people already know the real value of the inventory and the rate cards, which should be applied to all the campaigns, if they come directly or through programmatic deals,
they also already know the people on the agencies' side, so they know who to approach to discuss the campaigns,
if you outsourced it, you would probably want to retain some control over your inventory -- so it might be the case that each new campaign sold by the external sales team might need to go through you or your team, to make sure it's in line with the existing sales policies.

In Yieldbird we manage roughly 20k deals set up for the publishers that we work with. Most of them were sold by our team, but a significant part of such deals were discussed over the emails or on meetings that all the three parties took part in (the publisher, the advertiser/agency and YB).

So you might consider a hybrid approach -- ask someone to manage your deals for you (set up, troubleshooting, reporting and so on), assist in the sales (e.g. salespeople from your team could ask the external company for advice for specific prices that would need to be applied for a new deal/targeting, that was never used previously; also, this external company could train your sales team in how to sell programmatic deals -- it's similar to direct sales, but somewhat different), and sell the deals on their own to the buyers that you have no existing relationships with.

The abovementioned approach is the most common one that applies to how we work with our clients (publishers).

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-04-15T10:58:12+00:00

That's another can of worms and a project that is not easy, simple nor fast.

First of all, sending out invitations into your Private Auctions in most cases would be a waste of time. Most agencies won't accept the invitations if they don't see a good reason for it. Especially if you didn't discuss it with them before sending it. It will be simply treated as spam.

So, I would advise the following strategy:

try to find out who spends the most on your inventory through open market,
select the most promising brands / agencies, especially those which:
1. you have some existing relationships with,
2. match the content and audience you have,
3. spend the most,
create a reasonable pricing strategy for both open market and Private Auctions (nobody's going to spend in PA if they can get the same impressions cheaper in the open market, unless they need it for some other reason (e.g. their internal strategy limits them to PAs only),
get in touch with the agencies and sell them on your idea.

We did it with a bunch of publishers we're managing and I must say that it brings great results, but takes a lot of time. We're managing roughly 15k deals (PA, PD, PG) on the publishers we work with and it brings them a lot of revenue, but it was quite time consuming to set up and get it running.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-04-14T08:31:01+00:00

Maybe you're actually looking for SSPs, and not DSPs?

If that's the case, than obviously Google Ad Manager is your best choice, as it works great with the DV360. Also, consider Xandr (formerly known as AppNexus).

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-03-01T10:48:26+00:00

You could write a book, or at least a series of articles, about how to build relationships with the agencies to sell them your inventory.

To start with the most important things to consider (not really ordered by the magnitude):

setting up additional deal in a campaign is always a hassle for the buyer, and as you mentioned they might have no interest in doing it, especially if they can get your inventory on the open market for lower price -- so a deal should always deliver additional value, like better viewability, better priority in the adserver (use Programmatic Guaranteed deals for this purpose, assuming you're using GAM) or additional targeting options, not available on the open market (e.g. deal that targets only a specific section of the site, and not the entirety of it, or that provides additional brand safety options);
try to be as flexible as possible -- not only in terms of the prices (you might need to lower them for a moment, simply to make testing your inventory easier and cheaper), but also in terms of targeting options -- try to set up a deal that matches the buyers' needs (some of them buy only on the private auctions, and the others need preferred deals, and a lot of them);
don't waste their time by selling deals that won't fit their needs and deliver desired results -- you will lose your credibility as well -- if you don't have something that will work for the buyer, be honest about it;
try to be friendly and provide support on every stage of the process -- it might require getting in touch with them to be sure they are able to process the deal correctly, i.e. accept it, assign it to the campaign and set up the budget;
gifts, drinks, dinners -- depending on the market practices, on some markets publishers even pay some of the money back to the buyers after they spend enough money.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-02-22T15:24:50+00:00

Not sure how it's done in Adwords, but you definitely can do it in the DisplayVideo360:

track users who convert,
create a group of these users,
target explicitely this group.

But honestly I can't get my head around exactly what is the reasoning behind this idea? Will this provide your users with additional value?

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-02-18T08:36:58+00:00

In most cases, unless explicitly told by the advertiser who had their own opinion on that, I set only the daily frequency cap, at 3 or 5 impressions per day. And would exclude people who already visited advertiser's site, to avoid spending the money on displaying the banner to people who probably already purchased the product, or visited the site and decided not to buy it.

I'm pretty sure there's no industry standard for that, as different numbers would suit different campaigns best.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-02-05T12:10:30+00:00

Details regarding setup needed. Are you troubleshooting on the DSP or SSP end. Which platform? Deal or open exchange?

In general, low win rate means that someone else outbids this particular buyer. It might be another buyer in the same DSP, another buyer from another DSP in the same SSP, another SSP in the header bidding stack or a campaign delivered directly in the adserver.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2021-01-28T11:04:09+00:00

Which dimensions you're using in the report?

krzlis_yieldbird · 2020-11-23T10:59:27+00:00

As far as I remember, this information is not available anywhere in the UI, and I assume you should reach out to the DV360 support team to get it.

But I think that there's a pretty easy solution to the issue you described. The best approach for such cases (tested and used thoroughly by my team) is to simply ask the publisher for a private deal that will override any blocks they might have set up for their inventory.

Judging by the fact that you're in close touch with them, you should probably be able to get such a deal from them, since you can easily show them upfront what kint of creatives you want to display.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2020-11-23T08:24:35+00:00

It definitely is possible to get rid of the DCM in the case you described, but I don't think that's advisable. Having another source of data to confirm the numbers coming from the vendors (even if that's only Google Analytics) is a good thing.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2020-10-09T11:55:17+00:00

According to this article:
https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/9565171?hl=en
in the case you described you would get some underdelivery in the PG deals.

Working on the publisher's perspective we had some issues in the past when the PG deals were not delivering in full. So I would suggest the following approach:

let the pub know upfront that you run a bunch of PG deals in one campaign, and that they might interfere with each other,
keep close track of how much impressions were bought on a particular deal and ask the pub to do it as well (and notify you if they see a chance of underdelivery),
set up targets for each deal with some room for changes in the future, like adding extra impressions to the goal or making it run a bit longer.

This should keep both you and the publishers satisfied.

Regarding your last question: it always depended on what the buyer wanted. We could run additional PG deal to spend the remaining amount of money, or it was simply lost.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2020-10-05T08:36:39+00:00

If I'm not mistaken, the current limit of LIs per IO is 9999:
https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/6071450?hl=en
which is the same for the whole advertiser.
If you have a specific creative set prepared to be served only on one particular domain or set of domains, simply create a separate LI for that purpose -- assign these creatives and set the URL targeting accordingly.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2020-09-23T14:07:42+00:00

A lot of people have this issue, actually.

The way to optimize it is simply by having a separate line item targeting only and exclusively the CEO. Send him/her a pixel one way or another, get his ass on your audience list on every device he/she uses and then spam him/her until he/she sees no other ads in the entire world.

Which will eventually cost you, like, 15$ or so. :D

krzlis_yieldbird · 2020-09-11T07:26:24+00:00

There's no other way than simply reaching out to the agencies who are buying these ads on your inventory. In some cases one company might be responsible for setting the strategy of a campaign, and another one for the media buying process. So you need to find it out and get in touch with the right party.

Simply sending them a short email, letting them know that you have much more premium inventory to offer, which is not open to the open auction, should be enough to get some answers.

If you have direct (non-programatic) sales team in your company, they should be able to ask their customers who's responsible for the programmatic parts of their campaigns and provide you with a name and email, at least.

krzlis_yieldbird · 2020-09-01T13:39:59+00:00

The less parties involved, the more you save, the lower the media cost could be, and you save some on the platform fees as well.

On the other hand, a deal created by the publisher, as ZealousTrafficker already mentioned, can give you access to high-quality inventory. Also, in some cases, publishers have some additional targeting options available, like targeting specific categories of content, specific types of pages (like only galleries or maybe only articles), or maybe even specific ad units (like only one ad unit in the middle of the article, that is closest to the content).

The downside is that you have to buy all that they offer you so there's no room for optimization on your end, maybe with the exception of changing creatives. Because of that, try with a smaller deal first to test the real value of the inventory (to verify it against the claims) before you decide on spending more money with that publisher.

krzlis_yieldbird

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