Banner Ad: Please Fix Your Pacing Algorithm
Decorative Header Image

Tag Archive for advertising

| May 26, 2020
No comments

Real-Time Bidding: The Stack Class Video

You may have heard of this being referred to as Stack Class. These white-board sessions originated in the early days of Real-Time Bidding (RTB), before the dark times… before The Empire, er.. Header Bidding. Before Header Bidding.

This video is a little dated, but it covers the technical basics of RTB. I’ve been toting it around for years privately. I figured it’s about time to set it free.

I called it Stack Class in the beginning because I was describing all the components of Real-Time Bidding, you know… the stack upon which everything is built. In this video you’ll find SSPs, DSPs, user synchronization (cookies?!%$#@!), bids, responses, PMPs, ad markup… you know, all the things.

Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , , ,
| May 19, 2020
No comments

Is it Fraud? Illustrating some marginal to bad practices in ad-tech

A couple weeks ago I was looking over geographic location data to inform the return on investment of an advertising campaign. A significant portion of metropolitan data was showing a large percentage of the users sitting in the exact same location. It was as if they all checked-in on their apps while they were standing at the center of the city. That seemed unlikely. Was there something wrong with the data? Well, yes and no. More importantly: was it fraud?

Was it fraud? Welcome to the gray area of ad-tech. eMarketer shows that display advertising fraud loss is hovering around $6 billion worldwide. They likely derived this data from very black and white definitions of what is and what isn’t fraud. In this post I’ll be lining up not only explicitly fraudulent behavior, but also some marginal tactics of media owners, supply side companies, advertisers and demand side companies to illuminate the fringes of acceptable behavior.

Read on for geo stuffing, bid caching and more…
Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , , , ,
| May 11, 2020
No comments

Pacing Algorithm for Advertising Campaigns and Inventory Allocations

I was trying to figure out what to do with my Sunday. My options were: build a little header bidding ad server plugin for WordPress; run, sleep and eat; or write up some blog post on a pacing algorithm, because people still seem to be producing crappy ones. Since you’re reading this, you can probably guess which choice I made. I mean, it’s not the first post I’ve written on the subject.

It showed up again last week. I didn’t expect it, but I guess I never do. A saw-tooth pattern on a chart, indicative of a capping of sorts. A chart that says, “I want a thing to happen, but only so much.” In this case it was a traffic allocation. This was a surprise.

A little (bad pacing algorithm) history

Most of the time when I run into a bad pacing algorithm it’s in the form of a campaign trying to limit itself. It only needs to acquire a few thousand impressions every five minutes, for example. So the hastily written algorithm might divvy up the impression allocation into five minutes buckets. Effectively that’s 12 buckets every hour. So it takes an hour’s worth of impression needs and divides it by twelve. One twelfth of the impressions are purchased every five minutes. Unfortunately at that point it switches to a simple counter that says, “for the next five minutes buy impressions until the number purchased reaches 1/12th of what I need in this hour.”

You end up with a purchase graph that looks like this.
Sawtooth Pattern exposes a bad pacing algorithm

See that blue spiky thing? That’s the one that’ll get ya. Read on to find out how this impacts the industry and how to fix it

Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , ,
| January 10, 2017
No comments

Header Bidding: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

Header Bidding: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

Whether you think it’s a fad, a “hack,” the new standard, or the latest shiny object, header bidding has had a significant and disruptive impact on the advertising technology ecosystem. It may only be a matter of time before Luma Partners adds header bidding wrappers as a new box to their (in)famous landscapes.

The promise of header bidding with multiple exchanges has yielded positive results for advertisers and publishers but it has come with a cost that, over time, might be too much to bear. Whether it survives the fray, or evolves into something new, header bidding has changed the game forever.

Header Bidding: The Good

The movie stars Clint Eastwood. As The Good guy, he is not necessarily altruistic in nature, but he’s really good at capitalizing on opportunities.

Header Bidding brings those opportunities by providing premium inventory into the programmatic marketplace. No longer  are the best impressions locked away in the tower of publisher ad servers. They are now accessible via  the myriad of sophisticated Seller-Side Platform (SSP), Exchange and Demand-Side Platform (DSP) technologies. This gives sellers more articulate controls over the rules of engagement for every transaction.

Retargeting, made easier by RTB, can now be applied at all inventory priority levels, improving yield for commerce sites. Elusive audiences could be more readily captured by private marketplaces and the open auction, inviting new advertisers to test, refine, and commit to new deals with new partners.

Meanwhile, demand side systems are given the opportunity to bring more premium buying contracts to their platforms. This could be why some publishers started seeing higher revenue with header bidding in play. During Advertising Week in New York, one publisher cited header bidding as being responsible for 50% lift in CPMs. These types of statistics have been echoed by several others in the industry. While this might not be the panacea that saves the online newspaper, it certainly helps keep a few more lights on.

Next: The Bad
Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , , , , ,
| December 6, 2016
No comments

The promise of header bidding: Opening up premium inventory to programmatic channels

This article was originally published in Venture Beat on November 29th, 2016. I have written previously about the conundrum of header bidding. While my thoughts back then are still valid, the technology has progressed and the market is following. Following this, I’ve posted the good, bad and ugly of header bidding.

header bidding

Everyone is talking about the promise of header bidding, but what does it really mean to the future of publishing and mobile monetization? Header bidding is leveling the playing field by allowing sellers to make more intelligent inventory allocation decisions between traditional and programmatic demand. For advertisers, it allows for better campaign delivery and optimization by providing more access to audiences at scale.

By implementing header bidding, publishers and app developers are able to expose every single impression to a programmatic marketplace. Many sellers are already reporting 40-50-percent increases in CPMs, and buyers have a new ability to bring their data to bear across multiple inventory sources.

Next: The evolution, yield opportunities and scale
Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , ,
« Older Entries   Recent Entries »