Programmatic buying on exchanges has been shifting from CPM to CPC with advertisers and media buyers looking to buy clicks. Those who may still buy on CPM are running either brand awareness campaigns on premium SSPs or those who possess tracking technology so they can optimize the traffic they buy. While CPC campaigns still carry of risk of getting bad/fraud clicks, it has less exposure as compared to buying on CPM basis.

The challenges of a click DSP

The first obvious challenge of building a click DSP is to ensure that your transactions are profitable because you are paying your SSPs on CPM basis while getting paid on click basis. Do not expect every click campaign to be profitable and some may even show losses, there by requiring you to find other alternatives. But driving quality clicks through a DSP is an excellent option since all buys with exchanges are non-guaranteed, thereby giving you an opportunity to find right matching traffic and audience for the traffic you pay for.

Click Qualification

When you buy clicks from any platform, be it a network or a DSP, not all clicks are genuine or they hold equal value. Common problems we see are clicks emanating from data centers or from behind proxies, clicks carrying a different IP address as compared to the IP address in the original RTB request or cached clicks. Post-click fraud problems may include clicks coming in at regular intervals or multiple clicks within a short time window.

It is important for you to ask the DSP platform you buy media from the click qualification criteria they use when selling clicks to you.

Manual Optimization

If you plan to run your click campaign on a DSP platform that offers only CPM based buying, your ad ops teams need to curate and watch these campaigns very closely. Define a learning budget that would be used to collect data for optimizing the campaign manually. It is important for you to work with DSPs that offer detailed reporting at site id, bundle and referrer level besides standard attributes like IP and user agent. Without these detailed reports, your ad ops team will find it practically impossible to optimize the campaign and will be in a spray and pray mode and will have to be continuously engaged until the campaign hits the right targets and becomes profitable.

Auto Optimization

DSPs that provide an option to advertisers and media buyers to buy clicks need to invest in technology that could optimize the campaigns in real and near-real time. We present some auto optimization ideas here we have built.

Have your clients provide adequate learning budget.

Always use frequency capping in your campaign.

Ensure that your DSP platform has pre-bid fraud control options activated so you do not buy bad traffic.

Ensure that post-click fraud detection is activated and it creates block lists in near real time, if not real time.

Buying always cheap traffic doesn’t mean profitability. Create CPM slices to see which slice gives best price-performance.

Optimize for loss leader to meet campaign goals.

Contact us if you wish to learn more about building a click DSP.