OpenX Blog

During Advertising Week in New York this October, OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan joined John Battelle (Federated Media), and Scott Howe (Acxiom) on a panel discussion titled ‘The New Vision of Media’. Tim gave his perspective on the transformation of media and its relationship to marketing data and new strategies available to brands and their agencies. See the highlights here:

As traffic grows, so too should revenue. But for ChaCha, a Quantcast top 50 Q&A service that’s taking the market by storm, this wasn’t the case. That’s why ChaCha decided to reconsider its ad serving platform. A key lesson: don’t just look at the ad server… the provider’s ad exchange and yield optimization solutions are just as important. Impressed with the OpenX “stack” ChaCha started sending traffic to OpenX. The result: a 3x boost in yield that’s holding steady, even as volume continues to grow. To learn more, Paul Martecchini, Head of Marketing at OpenX, sat down with Shawn Schwegman, Chief Marketing Officer at ChaCha.

Paul Martecchini [PM]: Tell us about ChaCha – what do you offer visitors?
Shawn Schwegman [SS]: ChaCha gives free, real-time answers to any question both online at ChaCha.com and through mobile phones by either texting “ChaCha” (242-242) or using one of our mobile apps. With our unique “ask-a-smart-friend” format, we’ve become the leading answers service with more than 2 billion questions answered to date. All answers are provided in a fun, conversational format perfect for those in need of fast, free answers while on the go.

PM: I understand you’re growing quite quickly. Tell us about your traffic.
SS: We are indeed growing! Over the past six months we’ve experienced astronomical growth, going from 50 million page views per month to over 250 million. According to Quantcast, we’re a top 50 website, and we’re the number one mobile Q&A service.

The number of unique visitors just exploded; six months ago we had 18 million per month, today we top 38 million. Our page-per-visit rate doubled. It’s been quite a ride.

PM: What drew you to OpenX?
SS: When traffic was modest, we got pretty good CPMs. But once our volume increased significantly, our CPMs just plummeted. We were doing 4x more business, but we weren’t earning a dime more in revenue!

Also, we had issues with data transparency with our previous ad serving vendor, which meant we really couldn’t resolve the problem. So we decided to look at other vendors and quickly realized that in order to get our CPMs back up to where they should be, we needed to look at more than an ad server. We needed to look at the entire stack: the ad server, the ad exchange it connects to, and the SSP.

PM: How is the OpenX stack working out for ChaCha?
SS: Amazingly well. We started by sending 25% of our traffic OpenX. We didn’t think that OpenX could beat our previous ad server right out of the gate, but we hoped that with a little time, you could beat and eventually exceed the average CPM. But from day one, OpenX matched our previous ad server, and then over the next 60 days, OpenX was delivering CPMs that were 3x better.

PM: What do you attribute ChaCha’s gains to?
SS: OpenX is very focused on making us successful. Your commitment shows in our results. Our CPM rates have increased 3x and our fill rates are solid.

Also, OpenX provides us with a lot of data about our impressions – who buys them, the CPMs we receive – which helps us to get better prices. And the event-level feeds that OpenX provides lets us understand who values our impressions, who’s buying them, and what they’re willing to pay. These data features have transformed our business.

PM: How would you describe the level of support you receive from OpenX?
SS: OpenX has the best support of any software I’ve ever worked with. If we need to open a ticket, we can count on a very fast call back. Our OpenX account team really knows the products and can answer most questions. If they can’t, they loop in someone who can, usually while we’re still on the line. This is very different from our previous vendor where the support teams are essentially email or phone jockeys for the technical teams. We’d open a ticket, but it would take days for our support contact figure out who within the organization could help us. Most of the time our internal engineers would resolve our problem before we heard back from them.

PM: How do your ad ops team like using the OpenX Enterprise UI? Any feedback?
SS: My ad ops team tells me that with OpenX Enterprise they can traffic a campaign in a matter of minutes, as opposed to our previous ad server, which took them hours.

The less time the ad trafficking guys spend setting up a campaign, the more time they have to optimize and ensure we deliver the right level of performance. That leads to incremental sales. This is a huge difference.

PM: How would you describe the main benefits of OpenX for ChaCha?
SS: I’d boil it down to three key points. With OpenX we can:

1. Monetize better – even at scale
2. Optimize campaigns effectively
3. Count on outstanding customer, technical, and strategic support

Check out our case study with ChaCha

At the Digiday Publishing Summit this October, OpenX’s VP Mobile Solutions, Mike Dowey gave a landscape overview presentation to Mobile RTB, illustrating the varying stages of ‘mobile readiness’.

The full presentation can be viewed below, but here are just a few of the questions Mike was asked just before he came off stage, along with Mike’s answers.

Q: Advertisers are telling publishers “Mobile ads are small, cookies don’t work, and targeting is difficult. Why should I bother?” Any advice for publishers to respond?

[MD]: It’s worth starting to play in mobile now even though the CPMs are lower because there is a learning curve.  Publishers cannot just flip a switch to turn on mobile monetization.  They need to learn how their audiences respond to a mobile environment and how mobile buyers consume their inventory.  There are lots of new mobile buyers coming into the ecosystem all the time.  CPMs will grow.

Q: For many, Mobile CPMs are just too low. What do publishers need to do to get CPMs up?

[MD]: There are three things will lead to higher CPMs for mobile publishers:

• Transparency. Advertisers will pay a premium for transparent inventory.  Revealing the domain or Appstore URL is a first step in increasing CPMs.
• Local Data. Sending local data such Lat/Long will also lead to higher CPMs.  Lat/Long from the GPS of the mobile devices is the most valuable kind of data to mobile buyers. If you have access to this kind of data it will lead to higher CPMs.
• Rich Media. Enabling your inventory to accept Rich Media Ad Units will also lead to higher CPMs.  MRAID enabled ad units will open you up to a different class of buyer such as Crisp, Celtra, or Sprout.  These Rich Media companies are able to pay much higher rates than standard mobile advertisers because they are delivering more engaging advertising experiences.

Q: What are the best mobile ad formats for publishers in the near term? What are the best performers? 

[MD]: The most common ad units are 320X50s and 300X250 interstitials.  We are starting to see a lot of traction from the IAB Mobile ‘Rising Stars’ ad units, something that OpenX enabled the buying and selling of in our ad exchange, OpenX Market.

Q: How is mobile affecting the video landscape?

[MD]: Mobile is substantially increasing the amount of video inventory that is available on the market.  Video is also helping lift the CPMs of mobile advertising and giving publishers reason to integrate video ad units into their sites.

Learn more about OpenX’s mobile capabilities, or speak with Mike direct about how your mobile publishing strategy could benefit from OpenX’s real-time technology.

JumpTime was founded with a singular mission: to ensure that publishers maximized the revenue from their high quality content.  We knew that with the right science behind them, publishers could drive engagement in ways that maximized the revenue. We developed and delivered the science that would do exactly that, gaining three patents in the process. The real world results proved it was powerful technology, but we also knew it didn’t tell the whole revenue story.

In our work with some of the world’s largest publishers over the last 5 years, we recognized that every department at a publisher has a role to play in revenue generation.  No single group can deliver revenue alone.  While ad sales and ad operations teams play critical roles in creating the revenue strategy and monetization potential; it is up to other departments – from marketing to product to editorial – to generate the page and video views to ultimately realize that potential.  Everyday we would see evidence that would suggest what was missing was a unified platform that could align the disparate parts of an organization around monetization.

When meeting OpenX we saw kindred spirits with a shared vision: to develop the comprehensive revenue management platform that could maximize the return on publishers’ high quality content and audience.

Our combination will mean that publishers will be able to take control and ensure that they are not only getting the highest price for their advertising (using OpenX technology), but that they are also generating the highest volume of engagement and revenue generating impressions (with JumpTime). In short, they can tackle price plus volume all in one place. All while being able to access the data that tells them the whole story of how revenue is being created on their sites. We think that this ‘total revenue management’ is a game changer for publishers.

We’re excited to be leading the way in the next wave of digital media monetization together.

If you’re curious and would like to learn more about JumpTime’s patent-rich technology, read ‘The Asset-Valuation-Based Ranking: Bringing Economics to the Web’ whitepaper. 

Your audience is no longer tethered to a desk but increasingly viewing content from their mobile device. The spend in mobile advertising increased by 149% in 2011 according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and now, more than ever, mobile is becoming an essential component of a publisher’s strategy. As such, OpenX is committed to offering new and important mobile capabilities that enable both publishers and advertisers to reach mobile media consumers, be that through our partnership with Samsung to power the Samsung AdHub Market for Mobile, or providing mobile ad serving technology for the many publishers we work with globally. Our latest product release introduces a number of new mobile ad serving capabilities, helping those to serve ads to mobile devices with greater efficiency and control. These enhancements will be available beginning Friday, October 26.

Mobile ad serving

• Mobile device reporting:  Do you want to know if your mobile application’s ad space performs better on different mobile devices, or if performance varies by operating system? Now you can get a better understanding of how your mobile ad space is selling through three new reports. Run these summary reports based on device operating system, device make and model, or carrier, and view them in the UI or export them to a file.
• Targeting iOS6:  Targeting capabilities have been updated to include Apple’s latest iOS6 operating system, which means that you can target your campaigns to mobile inventory on devices running iOS6.
• Mobile SDK:  The OpenX iOS SDK has been updated for iOS6 and iPhone 5. This version of the iOS SDK is compatible with Xcode 4.5 and supports ARMv7 and ARMv7s devices. Click here to download the latest OpenX iOS SDK.
• Mobile device identifiers:  We have upgraded our SDKs to support multiple mobile device identifiers. In addition, new attributes for these identifiers have been added to the OpenX Market RTB bid request. The device identifiers include
  • Apple’s identifierForAdvertising (ifa)
  • Android ID
  • MAC Address
  • Open Device Identification Number (ODIN-1)
  • OpenUDID
  • SecureUDID

Learn more about OpenX’s mobile ad serving capabilities. View the full details of OpenX’s product updates in our online release notes.

If you are interested in learning more about OpenX’s products and services, please click here to contact us. If you have any questions or support needs about your existing account, please speak with your OpenX account manager. 

It is unequivocal that online advertising is playing an ever-growing role in shaping the future of marketing.  Here at OpenX, we’re working hard to ensure that marketers are able to spend efficiently and achieve their desired ROI from their online spend by leveraging some of the most innovative technologies available today, including Real-Time Bidding.

We invite you to learn more about the state of the overall advertising landscape so that you are armed with all the facts to successfully navigate the increasingly complex advertising industry. Be sure to join OpenX as we participate in various events during New York Advertising Week. View our full events schedule here.

Check out Sam Cox, VP of Publisher Business Development, in conversation with Digiday Editor-in-Chief Brian Morrissey.  At the Digiday Exchange last month Sam gave his perspective on private exchanges, simultaneous selling, and the future of exchanges.

The inherent value of inventory lies in a combination of the content that publishers develop and the audience that sees it (their demographics, household income, behavior and intent, etc.). Therefore, we believe that inventory should be priced on an impression-by-impression basis. OpenX Lift uses sophisticated predictive algorithms to accomplish this real-time valuation process. Our algorithms assess the user, frequency, volume, geography, time of day, and session depth in hundreds of scenarios to determine a market-tested price for all non-guaranteed impressions. Then, whenever an ad call occurs, the ad server (OpenX Enterprise or another) uses those predictive algorithms to determine what each of the publisher’s demand partners will pay. But CPM alone isn’t enough to determine an impressions true value. The ad server must also factor in each partner’s historical fill and discrepancy rates.

A price offered by a buyer does not necessarily predict how much revenue a publisher will ultimately get for their inventory. The offered price must be balanced against the buyer’s historical discrepancy and fill rates. A buyer may offer a CPM that’s 20 percent higher than a competitive bid, but if, historically, that buyer has a 15 percent discrepancy rate and a 50 percent fill rate, the publisher may be better off placing the impression with a lower bid from a partner with better discrepancy and fill rates. In short, we believe that the ad server should help the publisher determine the true CPM offered by buyers based on historical fill and discrepancy rates.

See how we make this happen in our new OpenX Lift video (above) and discover more about increasing your yield in our
How to crush your online ad revenue goals whitepaper.

Today’s sophisticated advertisers are opting to compete for high-quality inventory on ad exchanges using real-time buying (RTB). RTB demand is driven, in part, by impression-level buying which allows advertisers to purchase only those impressions that meet their campaign goals and avoid the impression waste of bundled sales. The result is excellent campaign ROI. In fact, according to research by Turn, RTB improves click-through and conversion rates by 135% and 150% respectively. Thus, it’s no surprise that advertisers are flocking to ad exchanges to launch their campaigns, and thanks to the growing number of quality publishers that offer their inventory for sale via RTB, advertisers can easily get the scale they need.

RTB bidding is here to stay, and publishers are wise to embrace it. After all, ad exchanges expose the publisher’s inventory to a global pool of advertisers their sales teams may not have had the time or mandate to target previously. Additionally, exchanges such as OpenX Market – OpenX’s global ad exchange – allow the publisher to take advantage of whitelists and blacklists to prevent channel conflict, transparent buyer reporting and price floors to prevent the ‘race to the bottom’. In short, RTB-enabled ad exchanges deliver a well-documented boost to publisher revenue as well as superior levels of control.

This should come as no surprise considering the competitive nature of the exchanges. Read more about tapping into global RTB demand in the OpenX whitepaper How to crush your online ad revenue goals.