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Few points which can help Ad-Network platform do more business with the same setup [macro-optimization]

Dear marketers and brands, please ignore whatever you read in this section 🙂 Helping brands reach & interact with their consumers is the most important thing; similarly, it is equally important for an advertising platform to make money out of it & meet the ROI. There must be a sweet spot between these two goals – and when an ad server system achieves this, it is a win-win situation for both – marketers/brands and the ad server agency/network.

5. Dynamic Floor Price

80-20 rule says, 80% of revenue is generated from 20% of the clients (brands). In an ad-network ecosystem, the rule is a bit different – 90% of the revenue is generated from 10% of the SSPs. It is a game of demand and supply where the ad server system is the referee. When all demand players land the battlefield, they all want to hunt THAT user (most relevant & likely to interact with the brand) & ad unit. This is the opportunity for a referee to change the rules of the game and make it expensive to yield maximum.

Yeah, it is a very cool thing to have an any RTB based ad-serving system; but there are two BIG challenges over here:

  1. It is not merely the site content that makes brands attract and bid higher, but it is majorly the quality and relevancy of the user that plays a vital role. So, defining a set of discrete rules to raise or lower the floor price won’t help here. Again, Machine learning algorithms that continuously track demands at user and ad unit levels would only help tackle the problem.
  2. The second challenge here is – if your ad server keeps raising the floor price then at one point in time, no/very few bidders will bid for the ad slot, and most of your inventory will go unsold. And once your system gets an “Expensive” label, it becomes difficult to retain and gain more demand. So, the system should be intelligent enough to know if demand is consistent and the floor price is just below the optimal point beyond which if it is increased, they are not going to be satisfied.

6. Know Your Inventory Treasure

What if your ad server is not RTB-based and you still want to take benefit of variable pricing? Well, there are ways.

ML algorithms can keep a watch on inventory parameters like:

  • Site/Brand Popularity – based on trending/viral content being published
  • Monthly Traffic
  • Alexa Rank
  • Content Quality – based continuous sentiment analysis, reader engagements & sessions durations
  • Audience Quality – it is entirely based on the user’s response towards ads being served to it – it is measured in KPIs like ads visibility, user interaction with ads, clicks, leads, and brand engagement
  • Inventory Type – it can be anything – a social media platform, SEM, websites, mobile app, push notifications, etc. but the behavior of each one of these is different – ML tracks the changes in the behavior

So, the ultimate mantra here is to make marketers spend more on inventory in demand.

7. Platform Secrete Survey

It is the advertising platform’s responsibility to make brands happy with the quality performance of ads, best-picked inventory, and reach the unreachable audience. Similarly, the usability and experience of the advertising platform play an important role to make brands happy and help to retain them for the product’s lifetime. So, the goal here is to understand the user’s behavior on the platform and mold the platform accordingly.

Make FAQs interactive as if a human is interacting with the user. This requires a very popular machine learning algorithm – Natural Language Processing. Again, a heavy piece of data is required here to make the system precise and accurate while answering the user’s questions.

Another example would be to track users’ interactions through click events, and the time taken to complete a process – say setting up a campaign. Using this data, the system can make inferences such as – which features are most favorite, which are very rarely used, which processes are time-consuming and which are the quick ones. All the conclusions made by the system if it consolidates and conveys to the project/product manager, they can work on the pain areas and work towards the betterment of user experience.