In the digital advertising world, it’s easy to catch people’s attention by bringing up transparency. Why? Because it’s in any company’s best interest to build relationships with their key partners – relationships that go far beyond the surface level.
At the same time, since most companies have an interest only in covering their weak spots, it’s in their best interest to also focus on the positive results they deliver to each of their partners.
When we’re talking about relationships that publishers have with their demand partners, ad platforms want to play up the CPMs, overall revenue and fill that that they can deliver.
No ad platform, however, is immune from bad actors’ efforts to push through security risks and poor-quality ads.
And not every demand partner wants to talk about those negative incidents with their publishers.
Transparency
Much of the discussion about transparency into ad security and quality focuses on holding platforms, publishers, and other stakeholders – especially their accountability for explaining what they are doing to stop negative incidents.
But as an industry, we need to go a step further.
Where security and quality are concerned, the kind of transparency the industry needs is transparency around what they bring to the table overall.
First, publishers need to make informed and often quick decisions about the sources of their ad demand. They need to understand how much revenue each of their partners delivers, as well as how many security and/or quality incidents each of their partners deliver.
These are insights that are essential to a publisher’s ability to make intelligent, quick decisions that will affect their business directly.
For example, Where are your redirects and offensive ad creatives coming from? And if you pause the source of that demand, how will your revenue be affected?
These calculations are much too important to be left to trial and error, and too important to be left to the publisher’s vendor partners.
The power of choosing which partners to work with—and how—should be left in the publisher’s hands.
GeoEdge’s BI dashboard allows publishers to do just that. It offers multiple maps and graphs, breaking down the traffic each of their partners bring, and the number and types of incidents each partner brings at the same time.
Transparency Phase 2
This is the next step in transparency that publishers need in order to take control of their inventory. It involves not merely assessing each demand partner’s performance on its own separate track, but charting all partners’ performance relative to each other.
Identifying security and quality issues as they arise, and then tracing them back to their sources, is manual work and can be extremely time-consuming.
This process can lead publishers to pause the incoming revenue they rely on, simply for the sake of troubleshooting and triage.
Real transparency means looking at not each partner individually, but at all partners. It means a clear view of good and bad performance, and in the moment and over time.
GeoEdge’s BI visualization tools
GeoEdge’s BI visualization tools also allow publishers to be more active and involved partners with their demand sources. In the dashboard, reports of ad security and quality issues show the suspicious code in the flagged ad creatives.
The publisher can easily share that code both internally and with any partner who delivered the creative.
This information can arm all stakeholders in the fight against malvertising and poor UX.
The End Goal
This next step in transparency raises everyone along the ad supply chain to a new and better level of etiquette. Publishers can easily translate this greater level of responsibility into the ability to optimize on revenue and performance.
In the end, this transparency doesn’t stop at the publisher’s bottom line.
A 360-degree view of security issues, quality issues, revenue, fill, and latency—broken down on the site-by-site, partner-by-partner level—can and will increase accountability throughout the industry.
