Overview
A long time Sovrn customer, Daily Voice wanted a better way to increase both its programmatic advertising yield and its operational efficiency. Daily Voice is a digital news platform, reaching over two million unique monthly users by focusing on hyperlocal journalism. Serving the northeastern US, Daily Voice bridges the “news desert” between national and hyper-local, reporting on town, city, county, and state news to inform and connect communities.
Key Takeaway: Signal dynamic pricing delivers 20% average revenue uplift across all ad formats.
20%
Average yield uplift when a floor is present
10%
Overall revenue increase
$0.39
Average CPM uplift per ad unit
Opportunity: An Efficient Way to Increase Revenue
Ninety percent of Daily Voice’s ad revenue is via programmatic advertising channels using demand partners through Prebid, Amazon’s Transparent Marketplace, and Google AdX.
Daily Voice ran static price floors across several supply-side platform (SSP) partners, updating on a semi-regular cadence to capture market movements. However, by the last quarter of 2023, it was actively seeking a way to optimize ad pricing and increase revenue during peak advertising season (and beyond).
We needed to capture the true value of our engaged audiences and broadcast that data to buyers in every ad price in order to consistently deliver against our revenue goals. Sovrn Signal’s dynamic pricing beat all our expectations. With just one line of JS code, the Signal technology helped us increase yields across all our programmatic channels in Prebid and with multiple SSP partners.
— Travis Hardman, CEO, Daily Voice
Solution: Sovrn Signal Dynamic Pricing
In the fourth quarter of 2023, Daily Voice agreed to Beta test the dynamic pricing tool embedded in Sovrn Signal, a data decisioning engine to understand and generate maximum value from every advertising transaction. Signal would measure, price, broadcast, and monetize the value of every ad unit in the test group to dynamically generate the best price and send it to bidders.
By adding a single line of JavaScript (JS) code to each DailyVoice.com webpage, Signal could dynamically:
- Measure the attributes of all impressions including visit details, viewability and attention, audience segments, and addressability.
- Price each ad using the attributes to predict and set the optimal floor.
- Broadcast the floor price in bid requests to SSPs.
- Monetize by routing requests to buyers most likely to bid at or above the estimated market price.
Throughout the testing period, Signal automatically updated pricing floors to maximize yield while alternative floors were tested concurrently to capture market changes. Signal dynamic pricing was passed to the Sovrn Ad Exchange plus several additional SSPs during the test, while a control group comprising at least 5% of Daily Voice’s ad inventory was maintained to measure the revenue uplift.
Results
- 10% overall revenue increase across all programmatic channels throughout the testing period
- Yield increased across all ad units when dynamic pricing was passed versus the control
- Revenue uplift remained steady, even accounting for traffic spikes, dips, and cyclical demand trends
- Overall yield increased across all programmatic channels, including in Google AdX
Methodology
During a three-week period between December 13, 2023 and January 2, 2024, Signal’s prediction and pricing algorithm continuously ran against a control sample, in order to determine both the effective market rate and the impact of dynamic pricing. In the control set no floor was passed at all to provide a true benchmark of the market rate without interference.
We determined revenue uplift by calculating the yield (or, total revenue divided by the total number of ads available) for ads with Signal dynamic pricing enabled or from the control group, and then compared the results. Yield for the control group was applied to the total number of requests that received a floor to determine what revenue would have been without Signal.
For the revenue uplift figures quoted above, custom targeting key values were passed through to Daily Voice’s Google Ad Manager to denote if a price floor was set or whether the impression was part of the control group.
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