Why do advertisers advertise on publisher websites? There really are two reasons, branding and getting leads. A lot of the onilne advertising space, and what Yield Manager focuses on is generating leads for advertisers.
The project this blog focuses allows publishers to tie into the Yield Manager marketplace through an easy interface and have all the networks and advertisers bid on their inventory.
One of the things the web has enabled is for these types of marketplaces to exist, but people are often confused about our marketplace and how it relates to eBay and other marketplaes they may have used. Jay Weintraub made a great recent post on his blog about lead generation marketplaces, so I thought I’d use some of it’s points to talk about our marketplace.
With respect to lead generation, true pricing means leads get bought and sold for a closer reflection of their actual value. For example, with mortgage leads, rather than buyers and sellers interacting on one, flat CPA, i.e. $40 per refinance lead, the market would give buyers the ability to pay differential rates based on the characteristics of the lead.
In our marketplace an ad impression is a means to getting a lead, whether that lead is a click or a conversion. In our case Yield Manager meets Jay’s criteria for true pricing because every impression is valued by our system in it’s likelihood to create a lead, and advertisers’ campaigns bid for it accordingly. The more likely an impression is going to turn in a lead valued by advertisers, the higher advertisers’ bids need to be, and the more revenue the publisher earns for that impression. The characteristics of the ad impression are what determines the likelihood it will become a lead. These characteristics include geography, how many ads the user has seen, what website the impression is coming from, history of results from that website, type of connection the user has creating that impression, etc.
Additionally, true pricing also implies that leads from one seller could differ from another seller based on the quality of their leads, i.e. the number of leads it takes, on average, to turn into a customer.
Exactly, and this is why every publisher sending us impressions earns a different eCPM for their impressions. The quality of their impressions and the number it takes to turn into a lead are big factors in what they earn.
The second piece to the marketplace concept, better access, states that buyers and sellers will find each other easier than they could on their own, and they could do so in a trusted, agnostic fashion.
This is one reason ad networks exist at all. They group advertisers who wouldn’t normally find or work with so many individual publishers together in a nice package for those publishers. Yield Manager takes it one step further by combining over 50 ad networks, hundreds of advertisers, and thousands of publishers. These people can connect easily to each other, meaning they have “better access” to each other than they could through any other medium. Not only that, it makes things a lot easier when they’re all being optimized through the same optimization and they all use the same counting and reporting methodologies.
This RMX Direct product will give publishers direct access to choosing what ad networks on Yield Manager they want to work with directly, giving them better access then they’d had before. Previously a publisher would have to apply for all these networks, get accepted, implement all these tags separately, log in to each unique system to get reporting info, and their inventory as a whole wouldn’t be getting optimized at all. With RMXD, you can sign up for all those networks in one easy step, get all their reporting data in one spot, and have each impression that comes in be optimized to go to the network who will pay the most. If that’s not better access, I’m not sure what is.
The big question, can it work? The answer, like so many things is yes and no, at least for the current state of lead generation marketplaces, which is all of two companies servicing only a handful of verticals.
In this case, we’ve already been doing it for over a year with select enterprise publishers. It does work, and it will be fun to see what happens when any publisher has access to it. For any ad network not currently involved in Yield Manager, I’d recommend getting in there to have access to these publishers. I’m not sure if Jay is classifying us as a lead generation marketplace, or if he’s even heard of Yield Manager. Either way we’re not really a lead marketplace in the same terms as Root.net, but if you get to the core we really are delivering leads to advertisers.
We hope with this product we’ll be able to give access to web publishers who want better access and true pricing in a vast marketplace. As with most marketplaces, the more players the better, so keep an eye out for it.
