The mobile media space has exploded in recent years, as our mobile devices have become an indelible aspect of our daily lives. We use our devices to communicate, shop and access content, among other uses, all of which have opened up endless opportunities for advertisers and publishers.
However, as with any emerging channel, standards and best practices for mobile media are still being established and new players enter the market every day, leaving media buyers and sellers struggling to determine the best ways to leverage the channel to maximize their revenue.
Mediation provides an answer to these struggles, but there’s a subset of the market that doesn’t understand mediation — what it is and how it can make them more money. First of all, an advertising mediation platform combines ad serving technology, inventory allocation optimization and reporting to allow publishers the ability to serve the right ads to the right audience and maximize their advertising yield.
For mobile publishers, selling as much inventory as possible at a good price is the top priority, however, most publishers have more inventory than they can sell through a single network or buying platform. This means they need to work with multiple networks, each with varying degrees of ad performance, so some yield better results than others.
Without mediation, publishers are forced to integrate each ad network one by one, resulting in sub-optimal performance. There is no marketplace competition, and fill rates rarely, if ever, reach 100 percent, with less than 50 percent being closer to the average. However, with the right mediation tools, developers can take back control over their inventory, how it is sold and bought, and run the necessary tests and reports to optimize their performance and revenues.
Many publishers are uncertain about mediation, assuming that putting another middleman in the mix means yet another bite out of their profits, but mediation actually has no downside, financial or otherwise. There are essentially no costs involved up front, and mediation doesn’t compete with existing ad network or monetization partnerships; it augments them. Moreover, mediation ensures that networks are correctly prioritized by value so publishers see the highest returns possible for their inventory.
Some publishers may be inclined to think, “I’ve been doing this on my own, why shouldn’t I continue doing so?” Of course, as we know, most digital marketing can technically be done without third parties, but a DIY approach rarely, if ever, yields anywhere close to the returns that a sophisticated, data-driven platform will. A good mediation platform has beautiful simplicity to the UI while also having an immense amount of complex ad serving, optimization, and reporting logic built into the backend.
Mediation not only maximizes publishers’ fill rates and CPMs, it also handles the heavy lifting involved in the transaction and measurement process. A mediation platform provides a portal to access ad networks through a single SDK, eliminating the need to integrate and manage multiple SDKS. As such, publishers are able to automate the process of matching inventory with the right ads according to their individual priorities, and consistently test performance and yield to optimize on an ongoing basis.
This means that publishers and developers can quickly and efficiently test new sources, shift ad network priorities and allocations, or choose different partners, all through a centralized platform.
Getting started with mediation is a relatively seamless process as well. Publishers simply have to determine their priorities for inventory sales, and prioritize the ad networks they use based on performance. From there, the platform automatically ensures that inventory is filled at the highest rate available, and feeds reporting data back to the publisher.
Mobile media is one of the fastest growing marketing disciplines and the opportunities for both publishers and advertisers are endless, but growing a business in a crowded publisher marketplace is no easy feat. Mediation is a no-cost, pain-free strategy that can help publishers of all sizes streamline their transactions, significantly boost revenue and optimize performance to help them stay competitive in a constantly shifting marketplace.