5 Tips for Increasing Black Friday Programmatic Revenue

Blanket advertising supported by a finely-tuned ad-unit structure and bolstered by diversified demand represents the best convergence in terms of achieving higher revenue.

The programmatic approach is all about taking advantage of seasonality, which obtains not only for high and low seasons like Q4 and Q1 but also for short-term demand opportunities, which occur at certain times of the year. The best example of this is Black Friday, which falls on the last Friday of November.

However, high demand and competition can also be noted from the Monday before Black Friday to the close of trade three days later, which in recent years has been rebranded as Cyber Monday.

Here we look to share a number of our programmatic approaches that have proven useful when it comes to generating Black Friday revenue. It’s important to note, however, that these same approaches are not equally practicable for all our partner publishers.

Before you push the implementation button at the inventory level, we recommend you test our Programmatic scaling approach.

UPR/Floor price reduction.

We are always looking to avail of floor prices and avoid their reduction, and this is because such reductions can both negatively impact the user experience and in the long term drastically decrease inventory value.

However short-term reduction can benefit revenue without impacting long-term performance. Considering this, you can try lowering the level of your UPR to the minimum necessary so as to keep poor quality ads at bay. If direct campaigns and your PG/PMP delivery are not compromised, then you should retain this level for a couple of days so as to benefit from the higher density of Black Friday campaigns.

More relevant content

During the Black Friday period, people are usually to be found seeking out recommendations for the best possible offers. When doing so, they will also come across plenty of negative press about how Black Friday and Cyber Monday prey on the naive and the gullible.

In order to engage people and generate more traffic, you can address in a forthright manner all the positives and negatives. Even if such issues represent a divergence from your usual content, you should especially promote your most popular pieces so as to increase the number of PVs, which are especially valuable in this period. And so, we maintain that this is an optimal window for investing in paid promotional social media.

High rates require a smart approach

We understand that you may want to sustain your floor prices at a high level for part or all of your inventory. And you may just be taking the right course of action because some revenue growth can still be achieved.

Traditionally advertisers bid using round numbers, and so in order to generate a slight increase in demand and achieve fill-rate, try offering 0.98 cents instead of 1 dollar. You may find yourself being positively surprised by the outcome, having avoided the necessity of giving a real discount.  

Keep a close eye on specific advertisers

If you see that some specific brands are paying exorbitant advertising rates during this period, you can try pushing your prices a little higher in order to see if they will adjust their prices upwards. This method has proved useful for the Second-Price auction model but will lose traction once Google moves to First Price.

Nevertheless, we have found that the bid shading of some DSPs can adjust very quickly to the change in rates. Indeed DSPS will only cease buying if the asking price is very much higher than their usual range.

Increase the scale of PD/PMP by creating a custom offer

Our yearly ace-in-the-deck options are Preferred Deals and Private Auctions for our partners on the buy-side, which allows them to achieve campaign goals in what is a period of high competition. For our publishers, it excites auction pressure and boosts fill-rate, thereby improving overall yield.

When “Black” makes programmatic ‘Gold’

These insights have yielded significant results for us in recent years, making the Black Friday period one of our top seasonal revenue opportunities. Of course, with all the changes taking place in the industry, we cannot be sure how things will pan out this year and in the years to come.

Following our own advice, we are planning to test and re-test all the described adjustments and to scale them on a verified inventory.

Let’s all meet the challenges and benefit from the unique revenue opportunities that Black Friday presents.