This month’s spotlight centers on AdX bid quality, examining how inefficiencies and rejection patterns shape publisher outcomes across the exchange. The analysis evaluates bid efficiency, rejection behavior, and value distribution across tiers to understand how demand strength, low-value bid density, and content or control-based restrictions influence overall performance. By assessing the impact of factors such as publisher blocks, floor settings, and tier-level bid quality, we identify where demand is most competitive, where meaningful revenue leakage occurs, and which optimization levers publishers can activate to improve yield and maintain stronger auction health across AdX.
- Across tiers, roughly 40% of Google demand (AdX + Open Bidding) consists of bids under $0.20, classified as low-value or inefficient. This rises to 70%+ for smaller publishers due to heavier reliance on AdX and limited diversified demand. Impression outcomes follow a similar pattern: Tier 3 publishers win 27% of all impressions, while Tier 1 win only 12%, showing Tier 3’s stronger dependence on AdX versus Tier 1’s reliance on broader SSP partnerships.
- Bid quality also varies sharply by content category, often more than by publisher tier. High-volume categories like News attract a disproportionately large share of sub $0.20 bids, indicating that content type has a greater impact on bid quality and buyer behavior than traffic tier classification alone.
Report Overview:
The DataBeat Programmatic Trends Report for October 2025 analyzes anonymized data from industry partners within the DataBeat network, focusing on programmatic advertising trends in the U.S. This report provides a detailed comparison of October 2025’s performance against both September 2025 and October 2024, offering insights into month-over-month and year-over-year changes.
Key Highlights:
- MoM, Display CPMs decreased by 1.1%, Video CPMs decreased by 13.7%, resulting in a 1.5% decrease in overall CPM.
- YoY, Display CPMs declined by 26% and Video CPMs increased by 28.2%, leading to an overall CPM decrease of 19.7%.
- To mitigate the impact and drive recovery, publishers should focus on diversifying demand sources, optimizing floor prices, and leveraging header bidding to increase competition. Additionally, exploring high-performing ad formats and strengthening direct deals can help stabilize revenue in the coming months.
