How to Escape Blue Monday in Programmatic?

After a high season in the advertising industry, the first weeks of the new year will bring an obvious slowdown in programmatic advertising. How can it affect your revenue and what can you do about it?

After big wins at the year-end, Q1 results are always a challenging period for the advertising industry. E-commerce consumption is down, the big brands refrain from major campaigns after the Christmas shopping madness. With media houses opening new budgets for 2019 it usually takes a few weeks before the ad performance on the websites returns to its normal levels.

First — don’t panic

Changes in demand not only affect profitable direct deals, but also open auction revenues. There’s less push and lower bids on the advertisers’ side, but also more programmatic inventory available after the Christmas sold-out reservations have come to an end. Both coverage and rCPMs may be lower compared to Q4 — and it’s a totally normal situation.

Rethink your Floor Prices or leave it to algorithms

To keep the fill rate on the recommended minimum level of 50–60%, it’s worth lowering your floor prices, especially for the non-premium inventory. It should ensure more coverage and, despite lower rCPMs, you will make sure your revenues won’t drop too much. Not sure how to set the best prices? You can leave it to the algorithms. You can contact me for more details!

Implement new formats

Native, outstream or just a quick sticky ad implementation? Q1 is excellent for the new experiments on your website. Broaden the types of formats you sell on your website and check what works best. Enter the video monetization with outstream — you don’t need the video content to do this! Try and test performance, an open auction is best to check the demand and widen your business opportunities.

Eyes wide open on viewability

Once every few months, you read that viewability is the new advertising currency. It is still too early to consider this as a major trend, but taking care of your viewability rates may definitely improve your ad performance. To get the best practices on the ad placements, I recommend checking out Think With Google demo. For more technologically advanced solutions to look at, there’s asynchronous ad calling and lazy loading to help minimize the latency and boost your viewability.

Simplify your ad server set up and give header bidding a try

Reconsider your advertising strategy and think of implementing header bidding and Open Bidding if you haven’t already done so. No matter if your work in the waterfall set up or focus your programmatic monetization on the Google-only provided solutions, unified auction will ensure the biggest auction pressure and work well for your coverage.