Sales Scaling Goes Both Directions
Inventory sell-through rate is one of the core factors affecting publisher’s income. Once a publisher has launched more ad campaigns than their inventory can accommodate, some of the contracts will inevitably fail, entailing fines and reputational damage.
If such a situation becomes habitual, the publisher sorely needs to take on media planning:
- Analyse traffic fluctuations and user segments.
- Regularly monitor ad campaigns delivery through the ad server reports.
- Look for lagging campaigns and adjust their settings.
In this article, we’ve covered the arsenal of tools publishers use to plan inventory.
When the inventory is regularly undersold, the most evident publisher’s move is to look for larger advertisers or SSPs with access to more sizable auctions. However, this year, big-budget contracts were first to postpone. So publishers have turned to medium and small businesses.
The idea is straightforward: instead of trying to boost sales with a dozen large guaranteed deals, you can catch that revenue with a hundred smaller contracts using the self-serve model. Numerous small deals are not profitable when they consume the resources of the Ad Ops team. But automate the sales, and you can bring home budgets that once were easier to leave on the table.
Essentially, publishers adopt Google or Facebook’s approach but eliminate intermediaries (such as Google or Facebook). They provide buyers with a self-serve platform, and advertisers can target an audience, buy inventory, set creatives, and track campaign delivery, all by themselves.
For an advertiser, this model:
- gives access to premium audiences;
- reduces ad spend through eliminating intermediaries;
- provides control over ad placements and guarantees brand safety.
The publisher, for their part, should:
- ensure the smooth operation of the platform;
- educate advertisers on working with the tool;
- maintain the volume and quality of data for proper targeting.
That way, the publisher makes guaranteed deals instead of piling up remnant inventory. At the same time, sales managers do not waste time on negotiating, data processing, settings readjustment, and reporting on every single campaign, since all these tasks are performed by the self-serve platform.
