01 - freewheel.com · result, it’s important to understand the nuances behind the commercial...

01 REVENUE FILL RATE

02 VIEWER EXPERIENCE REPEATING ADS

03 VIEWER EXPERIENCE AUDIENCE TARGETING

04 DELIVER VALUE TO ADVERTISERS AD CONSUMPTION

CONTENTS

FREEWHEEL | TRACKING METRICS TO RUN HARDER, BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER 2

Just like today’s endurance athletes have access to a variety of tools to help them structure and monitor their training, the most effective video publishers have learned to implement new forms of monitoring that help them look across their whole business and find lost revenue opportunities. Through our work with premium video publishers, we identified four sets of metrics to help manage revenue, improve the viewer experience and deliver the most value to advertisers. In one case, improved monitoring led to a $10 million improvement in annual revenue.

01REVENUEFILL RATE

Publishers need to have enough supply to

meet impression goals for sold ad campaigns,

but not too much supply that they don’t have

enough paid ads to fill the commercial break.

A publisher’s fill rate, the ratio of available ad

opportunities to filled opportunities, shows

the balance between supply and demand

within their inventory. Fill rate is a common

way to measure capacity, but in long-form

video advertising, the additional dimension of

time means that fill rate can mean different

things in different situations.

DURATION BASEDLENGTH OF ADS SERVED

LENGTH OF AVAILABLE BREAKS

QUANTITY BASEDNUMBER OF ADS SERVED

MAXIMUM NUMBER OF ADS AVAILABLE

COMBINEDNUMBER OF BREAKS WITH FILLED DURATION AND ADS SERVED

NUMBER OF AVAILABLE BREAKS

WAYS TO MEASURE FILL RATE


In addition, other factors may affect the inputs to fill rate calculation:

– Variable Pricing by Length: Different publishers have different philosophies on pricing when it comes to creative duration. Some publishers price all ads the same regardless of length, while others take duration into consideration. For example, a 60-second ad is more expensive than a 30-second ad. How the ads are priced determines whether to prioritize maximizing filling ad slots, duration, or both within a commercial break and may result in configuration changes to commercial break patterns and ad delivery logic.

– Changes Over Time: Supply and demand can change over time due to seasonality in both viewing and advertising, as well as operational delays. Fill rates may look low at the beginning of a month or a quarter when new campaigns launch, or advertiser delays lead to missed opportunities. Understanding these trends will allow you to quickly decipher between a common seasonal impact and an actual concern to address.

– Padding Commercial Breaks: Publishers sometimes pad commercial breaks by a few seconds to make room for ad creatives with imprecise duration, such as a 30-second spot that actually runs for 32 seconds. If a commercial break is capped at 97 seconds because of 7 seconds of padding, but the selected ads only add up to 75 seconds, then the fill rate would be 77%. However, if you know that the “true” commercial break duration is 90 seconds, then the fill rate increases to 83%. As a result, it’s important to understand the nuances behind the commercial break duration and how it may affect the thresholds you set for your fill rate.


02 VIEWER EXPERIENCEREPEATING ADS

Advertisers spend millions of dollars in marketing research to determine the optimal ad frequency for a viewer. It is a fine balance between a viewer not seeing an ad enough versus seeing it too many times and developing negative feelings towards the brand. Showing the same creative back to back in a commercial break not only adds nothing for the advertiser, it deters viewers from watching content. Repetition affects the ad experience not only when the creative occurs back to back, but also when it repeatedly appears in the same position in more than one commercial break.

BACK TO BACK CREATIVES OCCURRENCE

CREATIVE REPEATING IN THE SAME POSITION

NUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS WHERE CREATIVE IS NEXT TO THE SAME CREATIVE

NUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS A CREATIVE PLAYED MORE THAN ONCE IN THE SAME POSITION

TOTAL IMPRESSIONS TOTAL IMPRESSIONS

WAYS TO MEASURE REPEATING ADS


Advanced decisioning logic usually prevents ads from repeating back-to-back, but there are a few reasons it could still occur.

– Overlap of creatives across placements: Publishers sometimes structure sales packages in a way that requires them to traffic the same creative in two different places targeting the same content or devices. For example, one package targets all devices, while another targets CTV only causing the creative to show up back-to-back on CTV platforms.

– Sharing supply: Programmatic and automated transactions can also lead to ad repetition. First, if a programmatic buyer has also worked directly with a publisher, unless there is a common ID, such as Ad-ID, in both the demand-side platform and the publisher’s own ad server, the campaign may appear twice in a commercial break. Further, when publishers transact programmatically, they expect their advertisers to deliver a variety of ad creatives. However, sometimes buyers can’t tell when two opportunities are within the same commercial break, leading them to purchase multiple opportunities within a break for the same campaign.

– Video player or stitcher integration: The technology that manages video delivery, like the stitcher, that integrates ads into a content feed or the player on the user’s device may interpret the ad playlist incorrectly and play ads in a different order than intended. The video player may play cached ad creatives without checking the ad response for changes in the commercial break, also resulting in repeating ads.


COMMERCIAL BREAK

Ad ServerBooked Campaigns

CTV AdResponse

AdResponse

DSPResponse

CTV AdResponse

AdResponse

AdPlayout List

StreamStitcher

SCENARIO 2: DIRECT SOLD & PROGRAMMATIC CREATIVES OVERLAP

SCENARIO 3: STREAMSTITCHER INTEGRATION

SCENARIO 1: OVERLAP OFCREATIVES ACROSS PLACEMENTS

Placement 1:Coke - All Devices

Placement 2: Coke - CTV

Placement 3:Tide - CTV

Tide Ad:Direct Sold

Coke Ad:Direct Sold

Coke Ad:Programmatic

Placement 3:Tide Ad

Placement 1:Coke Ad

Placement 2:Coke Ad

TIde Ad

Coke AdCoke Ad

Programmatic Ad

TIde Ad

Coke Ad

Ford Ad

TIde Ad:Served

Coke Ad:Served

Coke Ad:Cached

CTV AD REQUEST

AD SERVER

EXAMPLES OF REPEATINGAD SCENARIOS

Configurations in three different systems can cause ad repetition:(1) Direct booked campaigns, (2) programmatic integrations, or (3) a stream stitcher cached ads.


03 VIEWER EXPERIENCE AUDIENCE TARGETING

Advertisers want to reach the right audience

at the right time with the right message,

but doing so requires identifying an

audience using relevant characteristics

like demographics, psychographics

and behavioral categories. Audience

identification requires some form of user

identifier; however, the complex video

supply chain causes challenges. To work

effectively, an identifier must (1) exist on the

platform (2) be accessible to the publisher

and (3) show up consistently.

There are several reasons why the user ID

may or may not be present in ad requests:

– Privacy Regulation: Privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA impact how user identifiers can be shared. Understanding the regulations and the integration, such as removing the user IDs of those who have opted-out, is the first step to identifying audience targeting capabilities.

– User State: In environments that don’t support cookies, especially where ads are not inserted on the content stream server-side, the player and the ad server need a unique identifier that allows them to recognize unique viewers for both targeting and to prevent ad repetition. If settings are reset, a login expires, or a

session times out, the same user will start

to look different, causing the system to

show repeated ads.

– Data Rights: Publishers negotiate access

to certain types of data with their partners,

and as a result, may have less visibility into

user data on platforms they don’t control,

like distributor or partner apps, than they

do on their owned and operated platforms.

For example, distribution partners might

not grant a publisher access to a persistent

user ID. Understanding the data you

have enables you to identify the gaps and

potential solutions.


PROGRAMMER

AVAILABLE

AVAILABLE

AD REQUEST

DISTRIBUTOR

RESELLER

LimitedRights

...&zipcode=#{request.keyValue(”_fw_zipcode”)} &...

...&ipaddress=#{request.clientAddress} &...

...&deviceID=#{request.deviceid} &...

...&zipcode=&...

...&ipaddress=[TRUNCATED_IP_ADDRESS] &...

...&deviceID=[HASHED_DEVICE_ID] &...

...&zipcode=[ZIPCODE] &...

...&ipaddress=[TRUNCATED_IP_ADDRESS] &...

...&deviceID=[DEVICE_ID] &...

Full rights by default

DATA RIGHTS FIELD

ZIP CODE

VISITOR USER AGENT

DEVICE ID

IP ADDRESS

3RD PARTY USER ID

NO

YES

HASH

TRUNC

YES

DATASHARING

DATA RIGHTS MANAGEMENTBETWEEN PARTNERS

Audience targeting depends on both publishers and their downstream partners sharing the appropriate data.

Scenario 1:Publisher sharing limited viewer data with Distributor partner

DATA RIGHTS FIELD

ZIP CODE

VISITOR USER AGENT

DEVICE ID

IP ADDRESS

3RD PARTY USER ID

YES

YES

YES

FULL

YES

DATASHARING

Scenario 2:Publisher sharing viewer data with Reseller


04 DELIVER VALUE TO ADVERTISERS AD CONSUMPTION

In a world of short attention spans and platforms that allow ad skipping, being able to show viewers who were exposed to the full ad is valuable to an advertiser. To measure ad consumption, the video player or stitcher sends a series of events, including: impressions, first quartiles, mid-points, third quartiles and completions to the ad server. Oftentimes issues with event beacons are due to the player integration, such as the player interprets the events it should send back to the ad server incorrectly. If these events misfire or fire out of order, the data will imply that the ad was not seen or seen more than once by viewers.

Beacon events are sent from the player to the ad server starting once an ad renders with impressions followed by quartiles and complete as the ad is played.

Impression (Ad Starts)

Complete (Ad Ends)

Quartiles

ADVERTISEMENT

DUPLICATE EVENTSNUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS WHERE THE SAME EVENT IS RECEIVED WITHIN TWO SECONDS

TOTAL NUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS

MISSING EVENTSNUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS WHERE NOT ALL EVENTS ARE RECEIVED


ALL EVENTS RECEIVED IN THE CORRECT ORDERNUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS WHERE ALL EVENTS ARE RECEIVED AND IN THE EXPECTED ORDER


NUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS WHERE ALL EVENTS ARE RECEIVED, BUT IN THE INCORRECT ORDER

ALL EVENTS RECEIVED IN THE INCORRECT ORDER


WAYS TO MEASURE AD CONSUMPTION


If event beacons do not fire properly, it could create inconsistencies within campaign reporting and billing. However, there are instances where publishers expect to receive events out of order or not at all. For instance, if viewers drop out of the video stream during the ad break, the player won’t send quartile and completion events. Further, server-side integrations commonly cache beacons and may send the beacons to the ad server later out of order. Making sure all the expected events are received is more important than the order they arrive but monitoring the order can help investigate other technical issues.

AD SERVER

ADSERVER

STREAMSTITCHER

CONTENTSERVER

VIDEO PLAYER

VIDEO PLAYER

3. Player sends properly ordered event beacons to

content server4. Stream Stitcher

caches event beacons

1. Content sent to player

2. Ad Request / Response

3. Player sends properly ordered event beacons

to ad server

5. Content server send cached event beacons out

of order to ad server

2. Content and ads aresent to the player1. Ad request / response

FLOW OF INFORMATION BETWEENTHE AD SERVER AND VIDEO PLAYER

CLIENT-SIDE INTEGRATIONA simpler flow and should always send beacons to the ad server in the correct order

SERVER-SIDE INTEGRATIONCaches the beacons before sending them to the ad server, which

can cause beacons to appear out of order


It is critical for publishers to assess the health of their business with insightful metrics that have revenue and user experience implications. However, similar to an endurance athlete who creates a training plan based on their data, monitoring inventory alone is not enough to improve revenue. Publishers need to understand the spectrum of thresholds for these metrics to identify problems and have a plan of action to address any issues.

JULIA ZANGWILL

Julia Zangwill is a Senior Manager in FreeWheel’s Global Advisory Services and oversees the team’s thought leadership. Her areas of expertise include addressability enablement, monetization strategy, and unification assessment. Prior to FreeWheel, Julia worked at Viacom Media Networks and AMC Networks in business development, focused on growing advertising revenue.

LAURA GAMBINO

Consultant in FreeWheel’s Global Advisory Services. Her areas of expertise include data analytics, market research, and advanced TV technology. Prior to FreeWheel, Laura was a data scientist at Omnicom Media Group on the Advanced TV team where her primary focus was smart TV data strategy.

SABRINA ALIMI

Sabrina Alimi is Senior Director of FreeWheel Global Advisory Services leading a team of consultants solving premium publishers and distributors most complicated problems. Sabrina’s career is focused on the forefront of new advertising technology shaping the future of TV at FreeWheel, driving industry best practices at the Interactive Advertising Bureau and supporting innovative buy side tech at Microsoft.

DAVID DWORIN

Leads FreeWheel’s Global Advisory Services team, where he helps clients navigate the ever evolving premium video ecosystem. Prior to joining FreeWheel, David spent a decade leading growth strategy initiatives at leading agencies, consultancies, and professional services firms.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS


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