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Archive for Free Ideas

The Header Bidding Conundrum: The problem it solves and problems it creates

Header BiddingHeader Bidding: Why can’t header bidding be done server side?
What’s the reason all header bidding implementations are client side, can’t the same be achieved server side? So instead of a waterfall do an auction by getting pre bids from all the demand partners? What would be the down side to that?

This question was asked on Quora, below is my answer.

Header bidding is designed to expose the clearing price of exchange and SSP auctions so that a publisher’s technology can make an informed decision about which ad to serve. These prices are pitted against each other as well as the publisher’s demand from their primary ad server, usually Doubleclick.

In a perfect world all of this would be done on the server side. The primary benefits would be reduced payload size and lower latency in the browser. It’s not likely to happen, however. It would require SSPs, exchanges and ad servers to figure out how to work with each other in a server-to-server relationship. These companies tend to be competitors; count that as a business reason that will prevent a server side solution. Read more

Audience Forecasting and Campaign Pacing

Audience Forecasting and Campaign Pacing“In online advertising, how can I predict/forecast the traffic (number of requests) for a day ?
For a given day, I would like to get the estimated number of eligible impressions a campaign will have, in order to allocate my budget and implement a traffic based pacing algorithm.”
This question was asked on Quora, below is my answer.

The estimated number of eligible impressions, or audience forecasting or “avails” as they say in the industry, can be derived in several ways. I will illustrate two of the methods.

The long, but easy method

The easiest way to estimate your avails would be to just take a whole day’s worth of data and determine how many of your target users are in there. The problem with this method is that it can take a whole day. If you have a day to spare, this is a good way to go.

The short, but difficult method

For this to work you’ll need the total traffic available for some previous day, or week. You’ll want that data broken down by hour or maybe 15 minute interval. With more traffic, your breakdown can be smaller. For the sake of this example let’s look at an hourly breakdown and a single day’s worth of data. Read more

Data Leakage is still a concern among publishers

Does connecting website X to an RTB exchange enable all potential bidders to track all traffic and users in such website X?

In other words, can bidders build full user behavior history of what the users do inside website X on a pageview by pageview basis?

This question was asked on quora, below is my answer.

The short answer is yes. Connecting your site to an SSP, or RTB exchange opens your inventory and your users up to being tracked by as many DSP buying platforms as are enabled on your inventory.

Data Leakage

Data LeakageEvery impression is put out to bid, along with that a user identifier is passed. This gives the buyers the information they need to make a decision, “Do they buy or not?” If the buying platform decides to track the user and build a profile on that user’s behavior, there’s little the publisher can do from a technology perspective. The shorthand for this misappropriation of information is Data Leakage.

Sell side platforms and exchanges generally have contracts that restrict buy side platforms (DSPs) from taking advantage of this situation. Data leakage was a serious concern in the early days of RTB and publishers were quick to ask for assurances from their SSP partners.

It’s a two-sided issue, though. The publisher is concerned about their user population being profiled, tracked and then purchased on cheaper inventory. The buyers have concerns about their advertiser intent data being tracked. The publisher can use this data to raise prices on the inventory or cut the buy side platform out of the deal.

Private Exchange

Both buy side platform companies and sell side platform companies are striving to introduce more controls over inventory and ad deals in RTB. The concern over data leakage has largely been subdued. Higher valued inventory and advertising is being sold privately using enhancements made on the RTB ecosystem. These private exchanges limit the exposure of high-value inventory to a subset of buyers and vice-versa.

Alternative to the CPM

Online advertising transactions are all CPM based. You might think my wild assertion is out of line. You might think you’re buying ads on a CPC or a CPA basis. But when a publisher is looking to sell ad inventory, they’re thinking about the CPM. “How many dollars can I get for every thousand ad views?” And when that CPA deal or that CPC deal comes in the publisher’s doing the math to convert that number into a CPM.

Blowing up the CPMFor a CPA deal they’re estimating how many acquisitions they can send to the buyer for every thousand ad views. For CPC, how many clicks per thousand ad views. They’re boiling it down to a CPM because that’s how they can compare the deals. It works like this all the way up and down the funnel.

The CPM has been around for a long time. With the advent of the RTB auction model, the CPM is very dynamic. Each impression up for auction is individually valued based on countless bits of information about the user, the page, the size, the date, the historical performance and a variety of other variables. Even though a separate auction is run for each impression, the bid prices are still in the form of a CPM. It’s in our blood. It is the end result of normalizing the value of an ad impression so that it can be compared to its peers.

Some Problems

I want to point out a couple of problems with the CPM. First and foremost, it’s a single number. This aspect causes a couple of secondary problems that put the buyers at risk. One of the big ones is that there’s no guarantee that the ad will actually show on the page. Steps have been taken to address this by several companies. The result of this problem is a topic near and dear to my heart: discrepancy. Read more

SEO: Simple Search Engine Optimization for Small Business

Search engine optimization should be used in conjunction with online advertising to drive more users to your site.  It can, in some cases, allow a small business to reduce the month-to-month costs of advertising by bringing “organic” (unpaid) traffic to their web site.

SEO for acupuncture in ChicagoSearch engine optimization (SEO) consists, at the simplest level, of three things: knowing your target keywords, optimizing your content around those keywords and building inbound links from relevant external pages.  That doesn’t sound so simple, does it.  I’ll break down these three points and expose my experience optimizing my wife’s site for her acupuncture practice in Chicago. Read more