This shortarticle is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most complicated terms. More from the series →
Originally released on July 5, 2023, this post hasactually been upgraded to consistof an explainer video act.
Traffic shaping hasactually been utilized within the advertisement tech market for a while, especially by supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs) filtering out offered programmatic advertisement stock that isn’t rather up to snuff before passing them along to media purchasers and marketers.
Recently, nevertheless, a coupleof publishers have began taking traffic shaping into their own hands for a range of factors, however with the supreme objective of just putting their most premium advertisement stock up for sale.
“If we are sendingout texts that wear’t get respondedto up to the buy side, we requirement to curb that habits… so that we can be muchbetter partners to those working to represent our stock for us. Ultimately, if I sendout more quote demands to an SSP partner that can be won, I endupbeing a more successful publisher partner to my SSP duetothefactthat they no longer have to filter out as lotsof unwitting or unsellable demands from me,” stated Justin Wohl, CRO of Salon.com, TVTropes.org and Snopes.com.
WTF is traffic forming?
Traffic shaping can be boiled down to publishers being more thoughtful about what advertisement demands are sentout to intermediaries like SSPs. But it’s a rather “squishy” term, according to John Shankman, creator and CEO of Hashtag Labs, a business that supplies advertisement ops options to publishers as well as tools that makeitpossiblefor publishers to gothrough traffic shaping.
For the bulk of time that traffic shaping has existed, it’s been left up to SSPs and DSPs to dealwith, which they did by filtering advertisement demands based on classifications — like locations, internetbrowsers, gadgets, etc. — that marketers ask for particularly. Now, publishers are either structure the abilities internal or utilizing tools supplied by business like Hashtag Labs to start filtering and lowering the number of advertisement demands they sendout out in the veryfirst location, to unclog the programmatic pipeline, so to speak.
“The publisher has constantly been informed to sendout out as lotsof advertisement demands as you can,” stated Shankman. “And actually, traffic shaping is the opposite of that in the sense of, let’s think about where we sendout out advertisement demands and what we sendout them out for.” He included that this is an advancement of the market where publishers are lastly able to have some gainaccessto to those controls.
What does traffic shaping appearance like?
For a publisher, traffic shaping can come in a coupleof various kinds.
- Requests by bidder
- Publishers can include criteria to the prebid code utilized to explain their advertisement systems to SSPs to figureout how and where their advertisement demands get sentout out. This technique permits a publisher to filter its advertisement demands by geographical place, gadget type and webbrowser, which are lower hanging fruits, however they can go muchdeeper into things like connection speed.
- No advertisements if idle
- Using their first-party information, publishers can identify when their users are active on their website, and if they procedure lackofexercise for a lengthened quantity of time, they can turn of advertisements on the page. This guarantees that advertisements aren’t getting offered that will eventually not be seen by a user.
- Throttling/Smarter demands
- This is a kind of performance-based traffic shaping where a publisher can timeout advertisement demands that go to particular SSPs if they’re under-performing or continuously sendingout quotes that are listedbelow the publishers’ rate flooring for a extended duration of time. After a particular duration of time (which the publisher can experiment with), the SSP gets turned back on to see if their quotes enhance.
Hashtag Labs presently uses its customers 2 methods to execute traffic forming: demands by bidder and throttling. Unwind Media, which releases videogaming websites Solitaired.com and Solitairebliss.com, h