Cultivating Premium Ad Experience with Traffic Shaping

You have built a powerhouse audience, one that devours your content and keeps coming back for more. But when it comes to monetization, are you letting just anyone into your programmatic playground?

Low-quality bid requests are like spam – they clog the system, dilute the user experience, and ultimately hurt your bottom line.

That’s where you can use Traffic Shaping. It's not a magic trick but a strategic filtering process that lets you curate the kind of ad experience your premium audience deserves. Think of it as a velvet rope for your ad inventory. By blocking ads when the user is away or setting criteria like advertiser reputation, user location, and past bidding behavior to avoid low-performing bid response – you ensure only the most relevant and reputable demand partners get to compete for your ad space.

What is Traffic Shaping?

While traffic shaping has been in the adtech space for a long time, it has been majorly used by the demand-side platforms to filter out ad requests from publishers with poor quality ad inventory or bot traffic. However, with better tech in place, publishers are also getting empowered to ensure that there is no clogging at their end, and they get to work with high-performing demand partners. It’s about time for publishers to take control in their hands.

The thing is, traffic shaping and bid throttling have always been in SSPs and DSPs baskets. They would decide which SSP to call or which DSP to send for cool-off based on their performance. As the ad tech industry heads towards transparency, the control has now trickled down to the publishers. With traffic shaping, they can decide what impression data to send to the SSP, which impression should participate in the auction, and which SSP to pull the plug on.

In a Digiday article, Justin Wohl, CRO of Salon.com, said, “If we are sending texts that don’t get answered up to the buy side, we need to curb that behavior.. so that we can be better partner to those working to represent our inventory for us.”

So, in simple terms, traffic shaping for publishers is a technique that regulates bid requests depending on different criteria – customer-facing and SSP-facing. It enables you to make the best out of your ad inventory and demand partnerships. This means you can strategically filter out low-quality requests, and engage quality demand.

Now, suddenly, your ad inventory will become highly sought-after real estate, resulting in higher CPMs for you – with only the most valuable and relevant bids vying for that coveted space.

But why do you need traffic shaping at all?

Addressing bidstream bloat

According to eMarketer, programmatic bidstream increased from 2020 to 2023 by roughly 2.3 times. However, the spending during this period grew by only 18%. Imagine the number of bids taking place and only a small percentage of it getting converted into actual revenue. A publisher can be connected with a single SSP via multiple exchanges, which has given rise to bid duplicacy or multiple ad requests. These requests are floating for a single ad impression within the programmatic ecosystem, creating nothing but bloat.

The real issue here is DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms) are not interested in every single impression that comes their way. Imagine if you had to sift through millions of irrelevant emails every day – that's what DSPs face with unfiltered traffic. This inefficiency leads to declining fill rates for you as a publisher and wasted resources for everyone involved.

Traffic shaping is helping address this issue while improving adtech sustainability by enabling DSPs to reduce their listening costs without sacrificing campaign performance and creating a carbon footprint.

You should work alongside SSPs (Sell-Side Platforms) to implement effective traffic shaping solutions, which involves filtering out irrelevant bids and prioritizing those most likely to convert, leading to lower distribution expenses for SSPs and potentially less processing overhead for DSPs, faster ad delivery, improved user experience, and potentially higher wins for you.

How to do Traffic shaping?

You can do traffic shaping while keeping your SSPs and customers in mind. Here are 3 ways you can do it:

Request by bidder: There is a unique adapter for every publisher, and in this method, publishers can set parameters in each SSP’s prebid code to control how and where ad requests are sent. It ensures that premium ad space is presented to relevant and potentially high-performing SSP partners – by filtering requests based on categories like geographies, browsers, devices, etc.
No ads if idle: Publishers can use their first-party data to determine if the user is idle and turn off ads on the page when there is inactivity for a prolonged amount of time. This ensures that ads are not getting sold, for they may not be seen by the user, ultimately increasing the profitability of your profile. This is a customer-facing traffic shaping method that enables you to improve your viewability and CTR.
Smarter requests/Smart Bid Throttling: Publishers can pause requests from underperforming SSPs and resume them later if performance improves. Here, the ask is for the SSPs to meet the publisher’s price floor, and if they are unable to meet it for a long period of time, they are blocked for the time being. It’s the most important shaping tool currently, so let’s learn this more in detail:

Smart Bid Throttling: Refining the System

Header bidding has opened the floodgates, and SSPs (Supply-Side Platforms) are bombarded with an ever-increasing volume of impressions. However, not all of those impressions are received equally. SSPs want to have a maximum supply at their end. However, they know which impression will perform or not. By filtering ad inventory by category (geographic audience, device used, domain name, etc.), SSPs offer only the most wanted inventory by advertisers.

Today, more and more publishers like you have taken this into their own hands and decided to unclog the system by filtering out or blocking out SSPs who are not matching your price floors – and not returning with a good bid.

Smart bid throttling is the weapon for a cleaner, more efficient programmatic ecosystem. Think of it as a smart filter for your ad inventory. By analyzing underperforming SSPs and their past bidding behavior – throttling can allow you to control if they’ll see your bid request.

You can stop sending requests to SSPs you think would come back with poor bids and later turn them on to see if they are performing better. This translates to a massive reduction of unnecessary ad requests – we are talking trillions of potentially useless requests every month. This not only saves bandwidth for DSPs but also optimizes your ad inventory's value.

This technique makes it possible to proactively filter out bids that are diluting the ecosystem, driving lower bid response, and alternatively achieving higher CPMs without compromising user experience. In fact, a clean, relevant ad environment can actually improve user engagement, a win-win for everyone.

How Does All of This Translate Into Wins for You?

By implementing traffic shaping and bid throttling effectively, you can cultivate a premium ad experience that benefits everyone. Here’s how:

Better relationships with demand partners: By implementing traffic shaping, you offer a platform with a clean, relevant ad experience, and your filtered audience becomes more profitable for premium demand partners like SSPs and DSPs, attracting higher bids, quality ads, and building stronger partnerships.
Happy users, more revenue: Traffic shaping ensures that only the best SSPs with the best bids are bringing the ad, which in most cases are of high quality. Getting relevant, high-quality ads keeps your users engaged. These engaged users are deep into the session, where they can be served ads with effectively higher CPMs. By doing so, you are creating a pool of satisfied and happy users who aren’t shown any intrusive ads and, in return, leverage their attention, translating into ad revenue.
Improved User Experience: When users encounter relevant, non-intrusive ads, they trust you and your brand. This fosters loyalty and keeps them returning for more – creating a smoother user journey and preventing reader frustration. This also means that happy users are more likely to stick around when deep into the session, meaning more revenue in your pocket in the long run.
Improve latency: By blocking duplicate ad impressions, you are creating a faster bid environment with fewer, highly valuable bid responses. This improves the latency of the website, further improving the user experience.
Reduced carbon footprint: You are helping reduce carbon emissions simply by optimizing and streamlining access to your ad inventory. This reduces the number of ad requests sent to SSPs, reducing the media's carbon footprint.

Traffic Shaping Offers Premium Ad Experiences

If you are among those publishers – who actively seek methods to ensure user experience is not compromised, practice traffic shaping solutions. It is the broader strategy of managing the flow of ad requests within your programmatic setup, allowing you to filter out low-quality bids and ensure only the most relevant bids compete for your ad space.

Moreover, combating bidstream bloat offers a more sustainable and efficient programmatic ecosystem – unclogging the system. This way, you will attract premium ad spending and foster a positive user experience with high-quality ads.

Implement bid throttling to get higher yields from your inventory, ensure DSPs operate more efficiently, and the entire programmatic ecosystem becomes streamlined. Ultimately, enjoy a premium value proposition by showcasing your valuable audience and command higher CPMs from advertisers seeking engaged users.