Header Bidding 2.0: Empowering App Publishers to Understand True User Worth

Most major mediation platforms currently run on a waterfall setup, preventing publishers from maximizing their revenues and often contributing to latency and loss in revenue due to historical pricing models.

In-app header bidding and pre-bid solutions have gained traction as a workaround to this. InMobi’s own pre-bid in-app header bidding solution, Audience Bidding, is one of the most innovative offerings in the market helping publishers to drive up both yield and also average revenue per user (ARPU) by providing in-depth insights into their user base.

Competition is Always a Good Thing

In a header bidding auction, all inventory is made available to top advertisers and demand side bidders simultaneously.

The increased competition means you always get the highest price for your ad space. No longer dependent on historical pricing models to determine the ranking within waterfalls, all demand sources are treated equally through a simultaneous auction. This effectively eliminates the pricing inefficiencies of maintaining a multiple call order system in your waterfall setup.

1) In-App Header Bidding Auction 2) Traditional Waterfall Setup

However, the nature of the demand landscape provided to you by an in-app header bidding solution is equally important. Audience Bidding connects you directly to 70+ DSPs with a single SDK call, thereby boosting your inventory exposure. But why a direct connection?

Too Many Cooks Spoil the Value

Direct DSP connections will let you optimize and streamline your supply channel. As many publishers know, dealing with a large number of middlemen/resellers of your inventory clutters your setup, decreases profits and results in a loss of control. Audience Bidding ensures you get the maximum value out of your connections through a single call to the DSPs.

If You Aim for the Average, You Will Lose

In recent times, DSPs have been gearing towards supply path optimization. Augmenting your supply with audience intelligence also ensures you stand out as enriched supply in a crowded marketplace.

However, most mediation platforms or header bidders today lack the rich data required to segment your audiences. Without this audience intelligence, DSPs end up buying a premium impression for what they are willing to pay for an average user.

In Audience Bidding, each demand source brings in unique audience data. For instance, InMobi overlaps carrier-verified audiences, acquired through its acquisition of Pinsight Media, with first-party publisher data. This enriches every request with audience data that can be used to segment the users.

This helps in identifying and creating audience segments that appeal to premium advertisers. DSPs can then clearly identify and target high-value users, which means you earn much more than before for your premium impressions.

While audience enrichment allows buyers to identify high-value users, it will only benefit publishers if they proactively cultivate high quality audiences. So, how can you identify, access and improve the share of high quality audiences in your audience base and push ARPU through the roof?

What Gets Measured Gets Improved

Audience Bidding will give you unwalled access to a first-of-its-kind Audience dashboard that will let publishers identify your high-performing audience segments and measure their performance.

You will get visibility into who the largest advertisers are, how much they bid for and the audience segments they value the most. You’ll also be able to deeply understand your high-performing segments through data on location trail of your audience, demography and their interests and pursuits as expressed both inside and outside of your app.

All this will enable publishers to steer your content and growth strategy towards acquiring and retaining high-performing audiences.

Interested in learning about Audience Bidding?

Whether you are working with an external or in-house mediation platform, Audience Bidding is can be easily integrated through the powerful InMobi SDK. Reach out to us today to learn how you can begin leveraging Audience Bidding.