Before taking the plunge into private marketplaces, publishers need to evaluate their business to work out which clients are most profitable, according to The Rubicon Project’s Oliver Whitten.
Talking at yesterday’s OPS London event, he advised publishers to begin by creating a graph plotting the amount advertisers spend alongside the frequency they buy.
Whitten suggested the advertisers that appear in the top right-hand corner of the graph are likely to be the ones publishers spend most time serving because they spend the most money.
“If think about which are most profitable and are core to your business it will help you realise which are most eligible to play within a private marketplace,” he said.
He also advised publishers to profile their businesses in order to highlight strong points and weak spots by measuring inventory against a number of criteria such as impressions, revenue and CPM range and give it a score out of ten.
“This process is the most crucial step because it’s not one size fits all,” he said. “The results are different for each and every publisher we work with.”
Finally, Whitten said publishers need to understand what their ultimate goals are in order to work out the finer details.
Objectives could include finding new advertisers, reducing the cost of manual performance advertising, leveraging strength in creative solutions to take a larger share of display, capturing spend from existing advertisers without causing channel conflict – which Whitten said is probably the biggest concern for publishers – and leveraging existing trading agreements for preferential pricing.
Once publishers have identified their objectives, they can then go about devising the right trading platform for their business and devising pricing strategies that suit.
As an example, he pointed to The Guardian, which set out to expand non-guaranteed monetisation, create additional inventory for the RTB market, establish private marketplaces with premium clients and actively ensure ad quality 18 months ago.
Since setting out these goals, the publisher has seen a CPM increase of 146% over non-guaranteed sales and has lifted its RTB CPM by 37%.
