Based in Sydney and founded in 2015, Publift set out with the simple goal of making publishers’ lives easy. Fuse, their plug-and-play technology, gives publishers access to a wide variety of market-leading programmatic ad technologies.
Goals
Publift’s team has rich experience in setting up and managing header-bidding solutions for publishers. Although their solutions yielded positive results for CPM and revenue, there were clear inefficiencies, including:
- Highly technical setup and management
- Page speed and performance issues (scripts added 1,000 ms to the bid response)
- Clients having to manually consolidate billing from multiple revenue channels
Approach
In January 2018, Publift worked closely with Google to launch Exchange Bidding across 50 publishers in Australia and New Zealand. Exchange Bidding is an Ad Manager-based, server-to-server, yield-optimization solution that lets multiple exchanges compete in a unified, real-time, equal-opportunity, first-price auction at virtually no setup cost. Exchange Bidding offers partners unified reporting, billing management, and auction transparency via the Exchange Bidding Data Transfer file.
“Exchange Bidding goes hand-in-hand with Publift’s core philosophy,” says Tobin Page, head of ad operations. “We want to give publishers the best possible results in the most efficient manner, and Exchange Bidding does just that.”
Results
Google Ad Manager’s server-to-server solution lets Publift minimize client involvement. “The seamless integration of Exchange Bidding means we’ve been able to significantly grow our Ad Manager revenue,” says Brock Munro, platform lead. “The simple setup has given us more time and resources to work on other product offerings.”
Exchange Bidding also offered Publift’s publishers better page speed, compared to a header bidding implementation. Since Exchange Bidding adds no script to the page, bid response rates were reduced from 1,000 ms to 160 ms.
Exchange Bidding didn’t just streamline implementation and performance of demand competition, “The consolidation of multiple exchange revenue streams into Ad Manager has resulted in better cash flow and management of finances,” Munro shares. “Our clients are now receiving more revenue, sooner.”
The introduction of Exchange Bidding had a great impact on Publift’s overall CPM. They’ve seen a 40 percent increase in CPM since launch. With Exchange Bidding, Publift was also able to negate the seasonal downfall that publishers typically see following the Christmas holidays. CPM in January 2018 grew 8 percent compared with December 2017, versus a CPM drop of 25 percent over the same months a year earlier.
Market Impact
Publift is growing rapidly in Australia and New Zealand. “In an ocean of competition and evolving technologies, it’s often hard for publishers to know what's best for them,” says Dan Lakajev, head of supply. “Exchange Bidding has become a go-to product for us. It’s an easy win. As a Google Certified Partner, we know we can trust new Google solutions like this. We’ve seen awesome results in 2018 and are looking forward to implementing Exchange Bidding across more publishers.”
