Week 1 | July 2024

In-Depth

Mastering floor pricing: The key to optimizing your programmatic ad revenue

Setting price floors in programmatic auctions is crucial for signalling the fair market value of impressions. However, various approaches and unclear best practices make this challenging. Vendors offer standalone flooring solutions, with Google Ad Manager’s Unified Pricing Rules being popular, while some large publishers develop in-house strategies. While setting price floors can boost revenue, it's essential to set the "right" floor to avoid harming yield.?

The challenges of price floors: Setting the right price floor is tricky: too high deters bidders, and too low attracts low-value bids. First-price auctions and bid shading complicate flooring strategies, requiring a long-term view. Measurement is tough due to RPM tracking limits and inconsistent floor application. Google Ad Manager’s Unified Pricing Rules selectively signal floors, leading to disqualifications and lost revenue. Testing shows the best strategy integrates tightly with a publisher’s wrapper. Experts recommend SSPs estimate fair market values for dynamic floors to optimize bidding paths.

A wrapper-integrated solution: Floor-as-a-service solutions often miss the dynamics of auctions and bidder behaviour throughout a user session. Vendors usually analyze post-auction data to set future floor prices but overlook important factors like whether an auction is initial or a refresh etc. Publishers should adopt a real-time, holistic approach to analyzing bidder behaviour and adjusting floor prices dynamically within the session. A successful strategy requires deep integration with a wrapper's logic to consider refresh auctions, session depth, and page views.

A holistic, highly integrated flooring approach leads to accurate inventory valuation for all bidders, improved bid and win rates across all SSP paths, fewer wasted bids, and significant revenue increases.?

Industry Report

78% of Indian consumers prefer personalized ads on OTT platforms

According to the 2024 Consumer Perceptions of Ads on Streamers Survey by Moloco and YouGov

• More people are moving from traditional TV to streaming media, especially on mobile devices.
• 60% of Indian consumers use mobile phones for personal streaming, compared to 26% for Smart TVs, 11% for laptops/PCs, and 3% for tablets.
• 34% of Indian consumers have cut traditional TV services, with another 27% considering it.
• 44% believe interesting and relevant ads enhance viewing; pre- and post-roll ads are most acceptable, while mid-roll and banner ads are seen as intrusive.
• 78% prefer personalized ads, with 48% based on viewing habits and 30% on viewing habits plus personal data.
• 83% report that ads on streaming platforms influence their purchase decisions.

Industry News

LS Digital introduces DigiVerse 2.0

LS Digital has launched DigiVerse 2.0, an innovative platform to bridge gaps in digital business transformation and prepare brands for an AI-driven future. DigiVerse 2.0 provides high-quality data for AI applications, streamlines operations, reduces reporting delays, minimizes manual processes, enhances visibility, facilitates collaboration, and integrates data for advanced analytics, significantly reducing decision-making time and improving business outcomes.

News18 Studio elevates S Shivakumar as the CEO

S Shivakumar has been promoted to CEO of News18 Studio. Sidharth Saini is now COO, overseeing the events business. Sahil Shetty is promoted to CRO for News18.com and Moneycontrol.com, while Don Zarrar is elevated to CRO for Business News & Firstpost. Manprit Sardana is now COO of Network IPs and Palette. Janardhan Menon will oversee branded content revenue for CNN News18 and general news, Teby Sebastian for Overdrive and Forbes, and Hemanth Kumar for startups.

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