[PART2] Programmatic career strategy to get better jobs | GAM Features & New Skills.

In this part of the Programmatic career strategy series, we explore the different tools inside Google ad manager that can help you to ace your programmatic strategy and get better jobs. Remember, practice makes a man/women perfect and with the right mix of skills & strategy, you can outnumber any number of competitors applying for your dream job.

Open Bidding

Not much to say as there’s not much to optimize. You just plug in the open bidding partner and the rest is done by Google. You don’t have much scope to optimize and can only talk to your SSP open bidding partner to check if all is right at their end.

HTML, JavaScript & CSS

If you are in adtech and don’t know any of these three, chance are you won’t understand complex terms like API, Endpoint, z-index, method and so many others. People in programmatic need to have crystal clear understand about these things.

You can use MDN guides to learn about these three or get any course on Udemy. The choice is yours but you need to start learning these before you can call yourself a programmatic master.

Header Bidding

Header bidding is a must, but with the right configurations. Always have short timeouts and less bidders. If you are operating in multiple geos, have a header bidding solution that allows you to run different bidders for each geography. Some SSP perform better than others in a certain geography and giving them traffic of their geography is like a dream to them. Plus, you can work with many bidders regardless of the limitations in the wrapper. Never go beyond 5 bidders in a wrapper as you’ll wreck your page.

You can also supplement your HB revenues with another wrapper than can run in parallel with yours. However, that wrapper needs to get incremental demand which is not available via bidders in your main wrapper. My choice is to always run APS (TAM/UAM) parallelly to the main wrapper as it unlocks amazon’s demand.

Aligning with Ad Operations

Keep an eye out on the ad operations. They might be overbooking impressions or over delivering campaigns. Sometimes, their settings will overlap with programmatic line items and hence will result in loss of yield. You should be cooperative with the ad operations to achieve maximum yield. At all times, you’ll have to monitor their deliveries as programmatic depends on the available inventory.

Also note, you plan your programmatic campaigns or demand executions based upon the direct sales reservation calendar. There’s a possibility where your campaign might clash with direct reservation. So to avoid these cases, have a calendar setup (if it’s not there) and follow it.

App Monetization – Not a Problem!

Increasing profitability on mobile apps have been painful for publishers. With custom executions not allowed and OOP/1×1 non-existent, publishers struggle with app revenues. In my experience, follow these steps to ace app revenues:

1. Lazy load ad units.
2. Do not cache units beyond 1 advance screen
3. Implement only native units and not web converted units.
4. Use a combination of Server-side bidding with a mediation layer.
5. Mediation – allows you to add/remove bidders without SDK updates. Eg: Ironsource, adsbynimbus
6. Custom implementations – Interscroller, Parallax units & custom native formats.
7. API – Create APIs to modify ad units. APIs allow you to make these change on the fly.
8. Render Rate – always have 100% render rate.