Mobile Ad Platform Raises CPMs, Boosts Brands, Improves User Experience
BARCELONA, Spain – Marfeel, a mobile ad technology provider that is revolutionizing the way publishers create, optimize, and monetize mobile websites, reports that early adopters of its supply-side platform (SSP) have seen dramatic increases in revenue—by as much as 300 percent for some publishers—thanks to using machine learning techniques in the process of automatically optimizing selling prices for ad space through programmatic buying (real-time bidding, or RTB).
“The problem is that publishers see the floor price as something static and immutable over time. Even the most sophisticated of publishers set the floor price once and forget about it”
Marfeel has tested 2 billion ad impressions, to date, for mobile sites in the U.S., U.K., Spain, France, India, Peru and Chile. After four months, results show that publishers have been able to maximize their eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) rates, by continuously optimizing their ad space-selling price. The SSP solution has raised the value of publishers’ customer experiences.
Among the test group, large publishers (those selling at least 2 million impressions) have realized a revenue increase of 200 to 300 percent within days of having the new SSP solution implemented into their mobile properties, according to Marfeel. Smaller publishers have seen increases of 30 to 40 percent, with geography, impression popularity, and other characteristics unique to each site accounting for the range in results.
The Marfeel SSP solves problems inherent in the traditional SSP “yield management” model. Ordinary SSP technology sets a floor price for the publisher’s ad space, then checks ad networks one after another in a “waterfall” process to find an ad network that will accept the floor price. The highest bidder wins, but pays the rate offered by the second-highest bidder, which is meant to prevent false bids placed to push prices higher. Marfeel’s SSP is unique in that it protects the publisher’s interests by optimizing the RTB. Marfeel sets floor prices dynamically, accurately predicting the top rate an advertiser or a DSP (demand-side platform) would be willing to pay.
Demand-side platforms (DSP’s) manage real-time bidding on the other side of the process, representing the interests of advertisers and being the counterpart of SSP operations. The importance of the supply-side platform has grown as DSPs have evolved rapidly in recent years, becoming more sophisticated at providing a high level of automated advertisement management and optimizing ad prices. The Marfeel SSP solution was designed to catch up with current DSPs and correct this imbalance for the benefit of publishers.
“The problem is that publishers see the floor price as something static and immutable over time. Even the most sophisticated of publishers set the floor price once and forget about it,” says Marfeel co-founder and COO Juan Margenat. “But this process requires dynamic adjustments, in some cases hundreds of times throughout the day—something no individual publisher could handle, at scale. That’s where Marfeel comes in. We can accurately predict floor prices by using historical big data and sophisticated algorithms and set them dynamically, with assurance that advertisers will accept those prices. That’s how our secret sauce makes all the difference.”
The new SSP model leverages the wide variety of Marfeel customers and the platform’s extensive access to advertising data, profiling both users and advertisers for pricing models. While any one publisher can analyze only their own sites, Marfeel “clusters” ad requests from many publishers and assesses data from billions of online ad transactions on its publisher properties. By learning across diverse sites, the SSP tracks user profiles, advertisers, ad networks and historical transactions in order to profile advertisers and specific user clusters for their pricing models.
Marfeel harnesses this knowledge to determine the value of a cluster of users as well as an advertiser’s spending limits and sets floor prices accordingly. This maximizes the publisher’s final eCPM, taking into consideration the publisher’s bottom line, as opposed to fill-rate. The Marfeel SSP learning process also takes time frames into account (for example, the same day of the week every week during the past 30 days), allowing publishers to adjust to changing rates due to budget allocation algorithms throughout the day, time zones, days of the month and months of the year.
In addition to benefiting publishers, Marfeel improves the mobile user experience by presenting fewer ads, with a much higher ad value. Readers view less ads overall thus experiencing the desired effect of ad blocking without actually screening out ads. Advertisers in turn are willing to pay more per impression as they know that the impression is highly performant and will reach their target audiences.
About Marfeel
Marfeel is an ad tech platform that revolutionizes the way publishers create, optimize and monetize mobile websites. Marfeel’s proprietary technology analyzes publishers’ unique audience—user habits, behavior and usage patterns—and dynamically adjusts the mobile site layout to maximize readership, engagement, page views, loading time, and ultimately ad revenue. Marfeel’s exclusive partnerships with over 20,000 global ad networks and exchanges ensures top-paying ads from premium advertisers. Marfeel’s mobile website conversion and monetization solution has been recognized by Google, forming a strategic partnership with the search engine. Selected Marfeel customers include: MensHealth (FR), National Geographic (FR), Dennis Publishing (US/UK), Elle (MX), ABC (US) and PopSugar (US). Marfeel is backed by strategic investors Nauta Capital, BDMI and Elaia Partners.
To learn more about Marfeel, please visit www.marfeel.com.
