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Tag Archive for quora

Floors In RTB: Are hard and soft reserve prices known to the DSP?

I assumed that before bidding, DSPs could not be sure whether an SSP applies floor price rules to an auction. Now, I saw some remarks in the academic literature implying that buyers know about the existence or even the exact quantity of floor prices.

In practice, do SSPs communicate their floors?

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

Floor Prices in an AuctionThe answer is: sometimes. Exchanges sometimes express floor or bid guidance in the bid request. This is not required for the market to operate; so many exchanges do not provide any guidance. Floors are almost always in play. In most cases they are dependent on a wide variety of variables including: the site, browser, device, day of week, time of day, audience data, user’s language, and geographic location of the user.

Auction Mechanics

Floor prices, from an academic standpoint, are there to protect the base value the publisher has placed on the inventory. Bids falling below the floor, or reserve, are usually rejected by the exchange. Losing bid information might be recorded to give the publisher insight on the value advertisers are placing on the inventory and accompanying traffic. Next: Price Floor Discovery

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

Disrupting the Bid in the RTB Auction

RTB Bid Keys

Your eyeballs are on the block, but they don’t always go to the highest bidder.

“In RTB, will the bid with the highest CPM always win? If not, what are the other factors?”

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

In a pure auction, the highest bid should always win. In many cases an RTB auction ends with this result, but not always. There are two or three things that will adjust the auction mechanics to give a lower bidder the impression. Most of the time a modified auction is at the behest of the publisher. 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.