Premium display embraces performance marketing

Last week, Deloitte published a detailed report on the programmatic market. Although the report mainly highlighted how programmatic (and video) advertising is flourishing, it also showed that eCPM for banner display advertising is decreasing year-on-year, with an average CPM of € 0.62 in 2016, 13 cents lower than the year before: a decrease of approximately 20%. Premium sold display inventory, for example through deal IDs or private exchanges, is on the rise and also have much higher eCPMs, highlighting the issue that programmatically sold remnant inventory has with its low eCPMs. Real Attribution provides an opportunity to significantly increase these eCPM rates.

Premium publishers realize that they have lost control of their programmatic advertising campaigns to the buy side (representing advertisers), and as a consequence they have seen their revenue and eCPM on remnant (non-premium display) inventory decrease. To regain some control they have implemented a variety of tools, from implementing a yield manager to setting up private deals and header bidding strategies.

However, most premium publishers are still reluctant to accept campaigns based on CPA. Even CPC campaigns are seen as more of a last-resort than part of any strategic sell side plan. The main reason is obvious, performance based campaigns were commissioned on last click only, whereas display campaigns typically feature in the early phase of a customer journey.

Advertisers recognise the value of premium display campaigns thanks to the insights their analytics and multi-channel attribution platforms provide them, but the last click model means that publishers simply can’t earn a competitive eCPM on CPA performance campaigns. Calculating these campaigns back to their eCPM often meant lower revenue, even compared to remnant inventory sold on an open exchange. This understandably resulted in premium publishers disregarding many requests for promotion.

TradeTracker’s Real Attribution finally solves this issue by allowing such publishers to increase revenue in performance campaigns. By attributing commission to publishers based on their value within the full customer journey, the advertiser is finally able to fully reward these premium publishers. Not only that, they can even adapt the model to reward them further, by:

A) Utilising a position based attribution model (U shaped attribution model), which delegates a higher commission to both the initiator and converter; and

B) Differentiating the value placed on different publisher types, rewarding content/premium publishers more than other type of publishers.

One of the first premium publishers to accept performance campaigns from advertisers running on TradeTracker’s Real Attribution have seen a three times increase in their eCPM, when compared to their previous eCPM when using other channels. This eCPM will also continue to increase over time because some of these campaigns have a customer journey time frame of 120 days. This means they could still earn commission on display touchpoints which were delivered two months ago. Another aspect this publisher likes to highlight is the fact that they have regained some of their campaign control, as they can now decide which campaigns to run where and with which frequency cap, simultaneously optimizing the value for the advertiser and, consequently, his own eCPM.

Key takeaways from premium publishers who have adopted performance campaigns:

– The campaigns need to offer commission based on attribution, valuing your place in their customer journey.
– Start with those campaigns/advertisers which you know are a great fit for your audience. You are in full control of when and where to run these campaigns.
– Position based models are ideal, since they reward the initiator equally to the converter.
– As a premium publisher, you should look for campaigns which differentiate the commission by the type of publisher, giving you relatively higher commissions.