Why 'header bidding' could be publishers' best bet for boosting revenue

There's no question that automation is transforming digital advertising.

It has reduced media-buying inefficiencies and improved audience targeting.

It's allowing both publishers and brands to deliver more relevant messaging to consumers.

Until now, automated advertising, such as programmatic, has used a waterfall or daisy-chain model for generating ad-inventory revenue.

This waterfall system is efficient. It sells inventory, but as the impressions funnel downward, their value typically decreases. Not every buyer is eligible to participate in every auction, so competition for impressions drops, along with CPMs. That has publishers wanting a change.

Enter header bidding, or "pre-bid technology," a system designed to level the playing field between direct buys, ad networks, and exchanges - and ultimately increase revenue yield for publishers. While it's been on the automated-marketing radar for years, header bidding is quickly becoming the go-to work-around for dealing with lost revenue.

Header bidding gives publishers a much-needed advantage by streamlining auctions and allowing them to sell more of their inventory at a premium. Multiple platforms bid on an impression at once, before your inventory's trip down the waterfall, so its value is retained. More competition and more potential buyers translate into more demand and higher bids.

Giving publishers an edge

When you break it down, header bidding is about putting publishers back in control - of inventory allocation and revenue potential. Those that have already applied the header bidding model to their sites are seeing firsthand its capacity to drive incremental revenue.

Publishers that have not had enough inventory demand in the past can harness their ad servers' capabilities to attract new buyers moving forward. In essence, they can create a private marketplace model where one didn't exist.

If they hope to participate in this model, though, publishers need the technology to deploy it. Obtaining this requires a partner that can help them avoid the "race to the bottom" by making improvements to site code up top.

One such company is real-time media technology provider Yieldbot, which recently launched Pubfood.js, an open-source bidding software created to empower publishers by helping them manage bid partners and assess bid data. It allows publishers to increase the value of their media and gives them a leg up in yield management.

Another benefit to the technology - one that's sometimes overlooked - is that header bidding can help create a better site experience for consumers by giving publishers the tools to improve page-speed performance. Passback tags and the cookie-matching process that can occur both before and after ad inventory is selected can slow load times, but some header-bidding systems can assess page-latency data and offer features designed to reduce it.

Pubfood, for example, lets publishers set time-out thresholds for bidding partners to allow for faster load times. It's built on a flexible open-source framework so publishers can ensure their header-bidding system keeps up with whatever changes automated marketing may bring.

For all of the advantages that auctions and exchanges provide, there's no disputing they have also affected publishers' ability to optimize revenue. Header bidding promises to help publishers reverse course and regain control of their revenue generation.

With the right partner - one well versed in this innovative implementation - publisher teams can profit from higher bids, higher yield, and decreased page-load latency. That makes header bidding the solution many publishers has been waiting for.

This post is sponsored by Pubfood.

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