The Problem with Ad Networks and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs)
This blog is an excerpt from our whitepaper: Optimizing Media Spends
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Ad networks and DSPs have reporting solutions that can you understand how your money is spent. Most solutions tend to provide enough insights for one to understand how your money was spent.
However, there are several issues with these solutions because they may not help:
Check Targeting Criteria: Ad network analytics may not help you confirm that targeting criteria were met because the reports provided may be limited in their scope and detail.
Check Frequency Capping Criteria: Ad networks may not provide any mechanism to check frequency capping criteria and whether the traffic served had in fact met those criteria.
Click Fraud: Each ad network has its own definition of click fraud and that may not necessarily be right for you. Ad networks never provide insight into what clicks are actually fraudulent, how much of money was lost or recovered through click fraud and so on. This is also the case with invalid or expired clicks which maybe from valid consumers but occurring long after the ad was displayed.
Viewable Impressions: It is estimated that 30% of all impressions are not seen by the users. This is a standard issue today in online channels and various third party technologies are coming up to address the issue.
In mobile, this issue is worse because aggregated supply of inventory gets sent to several networks and all ad networks respond with ad creatives without getting a response back as to which is actually shown. Some networks do measure the impression pixels back but not everyone does so.
In mobile however, this issue is getting resolved with the advent of Real Time Bidding through which an Ad Network or a Demand Side Platform (DSP) will exactly know which impression they have won and will be displayed. But again whether the ad was seen or not is something that is debatable.
In Mobile, Transparency & Brand Safety is a Big Issue: The current market where inventory comes through aggregators has some serious issues with respect to the transparency of the kind of content/ sites / apps where the ads are served on. This raises some serious brand safety issues. While networks tend to lean towards the advertisers and try filter out content, systems are not completely mature enough to automatically capture adult / porn content and prevent an ad being served on mobile. Systems like AdExpose which provide such functions in online advertising, independently - does not provide a comprehensive mobile service due to the fragmented nature of mobile devices and the limitations of technologies.
Even Among Online Ad Networks: Not all networks are very transparent about where the traffic was received from and what kind of content was associated with your ads.
The various scenarios of the traffic flow indicate a fast maturing marketplace with different partners trying to provide different value proposition. However there are a few issues with the current arrangements:
Redundant Users and Repeat Ads: Advertisers typically add more than one network or DSP to the mix. The problem with such a situation in mobile is that advertisers often tend to target and reach the same audience because there are a few large Aggregatorswho aggregate and supply the inventory the same users are often served ads from same advertisers despite frequency cap controls by various ad networks or demand side platforms (DSPs). This leads to inefficiencies and wastage of spends.
Lack of Sufficient Data: While there are a number of players who offer publisher / app developer specific analytics, there are none who are focused on gathering data across the networks for analysis by the advertiser. Data such as device, country, carrier etc. are good for basic analysis and are served up by all networks.
But data relevant to campaign funnels, conversion attribution etc. are all missing in the mobile advertising space.
Lack of Real-Time Systems and Real-Time Data impacts Decisioning: Lack of real-time systems and real-time data impacts decisioning and predictive ad serving. Not all systems in the ad networks are real time and this as explained earlier has several undesirable effects. Frequency capping may fail because data sets are not updated at real-time. Real time data unavailability directly impacts the ability of the ad network to do proper real time decisioning and make the right bids at the right price. All of these directly affect ROI.
Ad networks use several predictive algorithms to decide which ad to bid or serve. These systems rely on data sets that are several hours old because it is not easy to feed all systems within an ad platform with real-time data.
Conclusion: Not all Ad Networks or Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) ensure that your advertising spends are spent correctly. The only way to fix this is to use a third party audit/ analytics system and Reduce Data is a solution that has been built to address this particular need.
