BATTLING THE SILENT YIELD KILLERS
How a leading international brand boosted efficiency and revenues by 20% within three months
OVERVIEW
A prolific American brand commissioned Protected Media to improve efficiency and yield by eliminating ineffective traffic. Despite gradually increasing their investment in media buying, the brand noticed a disproportionate and disappointing return as Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) grew.
Using a variety of tactics explained in the report attached, Protected Media demonstrated the ability to improve performance for the brand within a month, amounting to a 22% increase in the company’s revenues.
CUSTOMER
An international brand, promoting their products across a broad range of publishers.
Campaigns include video ads across web and in-app, buying media both in walled-garden social networks and programatically.
Benchmarks are derived from averages including customer lifetime value (LTV) and cost of acquiring customers (CAC).
CHALLENGE
With an increase in ad spend, the brand expected to see a proportionate increase in yield. They were surprised to realise that the gradual increase in CAC met a declining incremental growth in revenue growth.
Furthermore, decision making which was based upon weekly report from existing analytics platforms, suffered from both a lengthy feedback cycle and from the fact data gathered was analysed post-mortem and missed out on peeks and anomalies in KPI performance. The broad brush approach was not considered as a threat to the business until the brand started to consider every part of the decision making process in order to identify areas for optimization
With the ability to scale up their ad spend and a desire to grow their yield, the brand found itself in a position where it was unable to grow profit or market share, despite increased investment. Having reached a plateau where additional investment ceased to impact revenue, the brand decided to find new tactics to increase the effectiveness of their ad spend.
SOLUTION
The brand used Protected Media’s solution for granular measurement in order to accurately assess traffic quality, and to eliminate ineffective non-converting impressions in order to boost yield.
- Dynamic identification and classification of traffic sources
By analyzing traffic sources in real time, and with the dynamic classification of every impression within every traffic source and sub-source, Protected media provides actionable insights for the marketing team. In this way, the marketing team can create and constantly optimize their thresholds and business rules, renegotiating terms with their traffic sources, depending on their performance. - Ad-source optimization
Invalid traffic (IVT) exists in every traffic source, and with granular detection brands can carve out the effective traffic so that they don’t lose valuable audiences in unilateral blocking. In this case the brand was able to cherry pick the legitimate traffic within its sources and simply eliminate the traffic which was invalid and never going to convert. This made a significant reduction on the CAC as the brand saw an increase in volume with the new approach of optimizing traffic sources rather than blocking the entire source. - Pre-bid optimization
The results of the platform’s analysis serves two purposes – it allows the brand to calibrate different traffic sources and negotiate terms whereby non-converting invalid traffic is not accepted, and it also informs the machine learning pre-bid solution. This AI component is critical for brands who want to reduce their CAC – by leveraging the pre-bid solution, IVT is excluded from the traffic source before the ad is served. - Fast track new traffic source on-boarding
With impression level granularity it becomes much easier to evaluate new traffic sources and to determine the quality of the traffic within. This enables brands to rule out ineffective sources quickly, as well as to evaluate a higher volume of traffic sources in order to scale up effective media buying, quickly.
RESULTS
Becoming aware of the silent yield killers came a result of optimizing the granularity of the insights flowing to the media teams in real-time.
Protected Media detected 11% of malicious non-human traffic designed to deliberately manipulate traffic quality (fraud purposes), as well as viewability issues where ads were not viewed.
The elimination of this ineffective traffic accounted for more than 20% increase in the brand’s efficiency and revenue within the first three months of working with Protected Media.
ABOUT PROTECTED MEDIA
Protected Media cyber tech was designed to power marketing teams in breaking the yield’s “glass-ceiling” by providing actionable insights around deliberately manipulated/ineffective paid media
With the precision that only a cyber security organization can provide, Protected Media is able to flag the impressions which will never convert because they are invalid or undesirable. By flagging ineffective traffic, advertisers remain protected, with their budgets optimized towards real, converting traffic.
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