What is Traffic Shaping?
Traffic Shaping is an ML-driven optimization technique that predicts an ad impression value in real time and directs high-value traffic to the right advertisers. This enhances supply value, reduces network costs, and maximizes revenue for ad exchanges handling high QPS.
How does it work?
Think of traffic shaping as preparing a dish, as the chef wants to put the best ingredients into the dish at the right time to improve the taste of the dish. In the same way traffic shaping allows to manage ad inventory in real time making sure that high valued ad slots are offered to best performing partners at the right time.
Request by bidder: Every publisher has a unique adapter, publishers can set a few benchmarks in SSP’s prebid code to regulate how and where ad requests are sent. We can set up floor prices making sure to accept the best offers for the valuable inventory.
Selective platform use: We can choose partners strategically that frequently deliver good results, instead of requesting all the partners.
Selecting ad slot: Just like a chef choosing the finest ingredients for a dish, one can decide which placements should be offered programmatically based on current traffic and engagement.
Auction duplication:
Auction duplication is associated with advertising in which many bid requests for a specific ad impression are sent out, this is a problem within the digital advertising space. Here’s what you need to know and why that is a problem.
- Publisher-initiated: When publishers operate with many wrappers, exchanges may place duplicate bid requests.
- Exchange-Initiated: Exchanges themselves may create separate bid requests for each impression.
- Buyers cannot be able to distinguish among similar requests.
- It becomes complicated to synchronize server activity.
- Some bidders do not reach the floor prices, and competition decreases.
Impact of Auction Duplication on the Programmatic Ecosystem:
- For Advertisers:
- Higher Costs: For an auction, there exists competition and advertisement spending from advertisers to get reach to audiences who are already exposed to their ads. For any ad from the advertisers there will be multiple auctions placed against it which would result to higher bid amounts and wasteful spend.
- Wasted Ad Spend: Advertiser spent would get wasted as he would have to compete for the same screed space with a lot of other advertisers leading to over-generalization and over-spending.
- Decreased Campaign Efficiency: It makes more complex and optimization is difficult and lead to poor ROI.
- For Publishers:
- Lower Revenue: Same advertiser bidding for same inventory would lead drop in fill rate and might ended on getting the inventory fill with low value
- Complexity of Running Auctions: The simultaneous presence of multiple bids creates complications, reducing the publisher’s effectiveness in managing inventory and yield optimization.
- Lower Value of Inventory: Variable demand makes it difficult to secure premium bids, thereby leaving inventory with unmatched monetary value.
- For Users:
- Ad Fatigue and Poor Targeting: Repeated display of ads from the same advertiser through various auctions leads to the ad fatigue felt by users, which harms user experience.
- Increased Latency: Duplicate auctions tend to slow down page loading and serviceability issues for the website, hence having an adverse effect on the user experience.
- Privacy Data:
- Increased Risk of Data Leekages: Auction duplications increase the number of entities handling said user data, which compromises privacy, and creates immense difficulties when it comes to compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA, etc.
Strategies for Publishers to Optimize Supply Path: Supply Path Optimization
In parallel with a few other things, this is something that publishers can do to manage auction duplication:
- SSP Optimization: Make integrations clean and simple such that there is only one good connection for an SSP to avoid redundancy.
- Elimination of Reseller Paths: Try to remove every redundant layer of resellers to increase profit retention.
According to DataBeat Sellers Report we have observed that that Tier 1 SSPs generally have a higher share of duplicated domains, especially where multiple intermediaries are involved. This results in auction duplication when Tier 1 SSPs are listed as resellers on domains where they already have direct connections. For more insights, check out the full report here.
- Directly Coal the Supply Focus: Work with inorganic DSPs to create and utilize the most transparent and effective supply paths.
- Avoid Bid Request Overload: Bid throttling should be adopted along with first-party data in auction pacing.
- Data and Reporting: Use log-level data to constantly monitor for and mitigate duplication.
- Set Up Floor Prices: Setting prices will mitigate the likelihood of undercutting from resellers by establishing a point of value.
The Need to Tackle Phantoms of Duplication in Advertisements In The Global Adtech Industry
Digital advertising moves at lightning speed, the adtech industry does not get time to pay heed to auction duplication, which directly affects advertisers as well as publishers. This is the reason why this industry has to deal with these phantoms.
- Repetition – Grasp Why QPS Limits Do Exist
Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) are often faced with bid requests, where they will end up overselling themselves and may quickly hit their queries per second (QPS) limits. Advertisers stand to lose in an amplifying manner which causes higher unfilled rates, campaign performance at the end suffers.
- Economics Of Duplication Did Your Revenue Comprehend?
These have been giving more attention to multiple intermediaries, which hugely impact the ad supply chain. Every intermediary eats away net earnings for the publisher, advertisers and media owners. With auctions duplication, less is achieved, but with minimal duplication much more can be achieved.
- Causative Factor from longitudinal and correlated skeptics
After looking through these there is the increase server load through greater, forbes.com will start jumping unto other sites dealing with unnecessary energy consumption. Duplication of tasks will take advertising spending to the next level, utilizing the blind spot to make exponential leaps.
- Inefficiency in Auctions
Issues of overlap tend to arise with duplicate requests for the same slot. An advertiser can, and often does, bid against his own offers for certain inventory. This problem is likely to reduce the amount of auctions that high-quality buyers are willing to participate in.
- The Primary Pain Point for Advertisers
For advertisers, it is incredibly simple to lose money through bid shading. DSPs that fail to efficiently de-duplicate bid requests, get themselves into a scenario where they are in several auctions at the same time. As a result, they are lead far away from their original goals and overspend in their efforts while failing to execute them properly.
- Increasing Trust and Transparency
A focused adtech approach to solving supply path inefficiencies by eliminating struggles of duplication will bring immeasurable clarity into the industry. The net result is an increase in confidence from advertisers and the formation of healthy long-term relations crucial for exponential growth.
How DataBeat Helps with Auction Duplication and Traffic Shaping?
DataBeat provides advanced services to publishers and SSPs regarding auction duplication and traffic shaping. We make sure that programmatic auctions are conducted so that bid requests are precise and overly broad requests do not occur.
With DataBeat’s traffic shaping strategies, publishers are able to preserve a proper auction ecosystem and SSPs are able to increase bid request quality confidence and revenue as well. Our services help remove unnecessary bid requests and increase the transparency of the marketplace.
Would you like to learn more? Sign up for our webinar, where we discuss real life case studies and detailed topics concerning auction duplication, bid optimization, and traffic shaping. Remain competitive in the changing world of digital advertising with actionable intelligence shared from industry leaders.
