(This is Chapter 8 of the Adomik Programmatic Yield Management Handbook)
Programmatic trading data is the oxygen to the modern digital media seller’s success. Commanding and mastering it will allow publishers to own thier own destiny
We all know the new programmatic reality is here – and according to Magna Global it will rapidly accelerate to a $53 billion opportunity. The question for media sellers now is how to participate in this growth while knowing and capturing appropriate value for your inventory.
As you have heard us say earlier in this handbook, the key to success in programmatic yield management is command of your seller data and becoming a data-driven seller. Regardless if you manage yield with a traditional waterfall or use header bidding, you need data to know what your inventory is worth and what’s going on day-to-day in your portfolio.
The buy-side has a solid command of buyer data such as audience data, cookies, and other 3rd party information. Exchanges have followed suit by being highly proficient with their data to help them create healthy and robust marketplaces. Sellers also need to take the critical step to control and command their own seller data.
So let’s clearly define seller data.
Seller data encompasses the publishers first-party data (audience, context, and category data) combined with the seller’s Trading Data – the bid-level data a publisher’s auctions generate on the ad exchange. Trading data includes key data about auctions, buyers, advertisers, bidders, segments, format, time of the day, browsers, operating systems, etcetera. (NOTE: seller trading data explicitly excludes proprietary buyer data like audience targeting). When a seller’s trading data is combined with the seller’s first-party data, more insight and value can be extracted from inventory.
The benefits of getting to know your data
Publishers need to take ownership and command of their seller data. Data truly is power for publishers – and once publishers take control and master their data, the route to success becomes more clear.
Mastery of your Trading Data will result in transparency, more effective dialog with buyers, and knowledge of what your inventory is worth. While mastering trading data is a “Big Data” problem, tools exist today to make this both affordable and easy. Once armed with data sets and analytics tools, sellers can use the real-time insights, transparency, and intelligence to more effectively work with buyers to optimize sales and create win-win deals across all programmatic channels; direct, Deal ID and open RTB – and do so confidently while enhancing sought-after predictability for their buyers.
4 key takeaways:
- Take ownership of your data: Own, protect, and control the core of your business and the source of your intelligence – your Trading Data. For publishers, this bid-level data from exchanges reveals who’s bidding and winning as well as a myriad of other dimensions. The easiest path to obtaining this data is to simply require your exchange or your header bidding partners to provide this data to you (in some cases this data will incur fees).
- Leverage your data: Using newly affordable ‘big data’ analytics and business intelligence tools, you can unearth insights and expertise to inform rapid decisions, immediately rebalance your strategies to meet market changes, increase revenue, and greatly improve transparency and relationships with trading partners.
- Use data-driven insights to optimize across your entire portfolio: For sellers, the only way to truly optimize is to look at both private deals and RTB, then leverage them symbiotically to price more efficiently and manage yield. To truly optimize at this scale (literally thousands of rules per day touching millions of actions and hundreds of buyers) publishers can now leverage machine-mediated optimization to rapidly push pricing updates to their exchanges.
- Strengthen your programmatic relationships: Programmatic is about data so use your trading data to deepen your relationships with buyers and sellers. Once you have analyzed your trading data, you have the transparency to identify opportunities with your partners, share insights with them to improve trade, and build long-term relationships over more efficient programmatic pipes.
As you likely know, Adomik provides programmatic analytics and yield management tools that help sellers glean insights and increase revenue from their seller data. for more information, click here.
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