[PART1] Programmatic career strategy to get better jobs | Optimizations & Google Adx.

If you are working for a media publisher and often find yourself in a situation where you think that your career is not moving forward or that there are not many options to increase your productivity by increasing your revenue, you can always utilize the below strategy to ace up in your organization. This below strategy is  a result of years of testing and experimentation and can really no just help you to maintain your current job but get the next one.

So, clear your mind and start digesting this strategy as it’ll blow your mind.

Google & Floor Prices

Google has been known to provide world class advertising & marketing technology platforms to publishers out there. From GAM to GA, their products outclass the nearest competitor. This, however, comes with a caveat that Google still is a business and no matter how great/free the product is, they have to maintain their bottom-line and answer to the shareholders. Now I’m not going to talk about the whole ‘Google is a monopoly and a walled garden’ and focus on my learnings the hard way. Below are my learnings broken down in points.

AdX First look

This piece of tech inside GAM allows google to buy sponsored inventory if Adx bids more than the sponsored line item. This might sound unfair to publishers but can be beneficial. If there’s a direct reservation campaign that needs to deliver a 100% Share of voice, blocking first look can be detrimental. Instead, use an artificially bloated price in the line item to give first look competition. This helps to increase auction value of the inventory. First look should be enabled on all inventory as it allows Google to understand how premium your inventory is (if priced artificially). Know, there’s no way to quantify it, however,   in   the   long   run,   it   helps   to   maintain   value   of   the   inventory.

Differential Pricing & Rule limit

Try not to have too many pricing rules inside GAM but try to cover all the inventory. For a big publisher, 70 rules should be enough. Differential pricing per geography, site & inventory performance is a real big winner. Always cover your core geography (where you are based out of) with most rules as buyers there know your website and will generally bid based upon your brand value. For smaller markets, you can keep less rules as in those markets your brand is not known and whatever demand you will get is going to be ROS & not target specifically to your website. For video, anything outside of core markets should not be priced aggressively as video cost is high for buyer and they want to be relevant. So, I generally following pricing structure:

Excel table & image

Updating Floor Prices – With buyers using advanced analytics and tools to measure success of their buying, the publisher is selling his inventory with 1 hand tied behind his back. Now when so much intelligence is being put by the buyer, the advertiser needs to be smart. One way to be present fairly in this game is to play smartly with your price floors. Below strategy will help you stay in the game. Also keep updating your floors every 2 days with 1 or 2 cents. This keeps the algorithms at buy side occupied and gives them less time for bid shading.

Target CPM & Google Optimized Floors

Straight Answer – No! Never use them.

In my personal experience and what I’ve gathered from the industry, target CPM & Google Optimizing floors reduce the value of your inventory. The argument given by Google is that these two features will fill your inventory. If filling the inventory was the game, we would never really use floors. Floors are meant to protect your pricing and create a barrier between the low & high value advertisers. With these two pricing strategies, you will lose your long-term value and hence revenue.

Experiments

Experiments in GAM are a good feature but if used with caution. Use experiments when you are unsure whether to modify the pricing rule or not. I generally use them to differentially price a certain part of the traffic just to offset the loss I might be making from the rest of the traffic. I rarely apply the experiment to the whole traffic as most of the time uplift in demand had already subsided by the time the experiment gathered enough data.

Competition

Try to have multiple price priority line items in GAM. This induces competition amongst Open Bidding & Ad Exchange; resulting in better yield. This is what HB does and as a publisher you can have networks running at price priority just to induce competition.

The next part of this series will cover other aspects and skills needed to ace your career in programmatic