Banner Ad: Please Fix Your Pacing Algorithm
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Tag Archive for advertising

| November 15, 2016
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Page Performance and Ad Tech: Speed is still a feature on the open web

Maintaining a good user experience while delivering quality content, and paying for it

Page Performance - A cautionary tale

Page performance has been cited as a reason to install an ad-blocker. In fact, a recent straw poll suggests that 71% of ad-blocker users would whitelist a publisher website if the page performance didn’t suffer. Blocking ads, which can be half of the content of a web page, will almost certainly improve the page performance. Mozilla Firefox even has a “reader view” available for many pages that removes all the content except the main body copy. That feature goes as far beyond ad blocking as you can get.

The four things that slow down page performance are:

  • the number of requests the browser is making
  • the time it takes for a response
  • the payload associated with each request
  • the code executed on the page once the request is fulfilled

In many cases the executed code will make additional requests and the dance starts all over again. This process takes a toll on page performance and each browser responds a little differently to the tasks. The browser may appear sluggish or unresponsive while the page elements are loading, executing or rendering. It may present the loading icon in the tab, which itself can freeze.

Next: Browser limits and performance tuning help
Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , ,
| January 19, 2016
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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

Category: Free Ideas | Tags: , , , , , ,
| January 12, 2016
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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

Category: Free Ideas | Tags: , , , , ,
| January 4, 2016
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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

Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , , , ,
| December 10, 2014
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Digital Advertising Predictions for 2015

The marketing department at Signal asked several people at the company to make digital advertising predictions for 2015. With their blessing, I’m publishing my predictions right here. I also added a couple of additional topics at the bottom.

Advertising Predictions - 2015

The Ecosystem

2015 will be a big year for IPOs and consolidation. Startups will form in nascent categories, but not so much in established ones. Luma will produce a new set of Lumascapes to accommodate the rise of new categories. This is hardly a shocking prediction.

Cross-Channel

Cross-channel will be the rule in 2015. Companies with a single channel solution will be the exception (and the Dodo).

Programmatic

We’ll see the rise of the Meta-DSP where Agency systems will be plugging into DSP stacks via APIs. Smarter systems will be able to segment users across DSP buying systems and regain control of Frequency and Reach.

Native advertising

Native Normalization: Native ads will begin to follow responsive design techniques. “Standardized Native Ads” will become the biggest oxymoron of 2015. Native ad specifications are already working their way into the OpenRTB API Specification. The road to standardization is very short from that point on. Read more

Category: Predictions | Tags: , , , , , ,
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