Project Agora, one of the leading Media Technology companies in EMEA, recently announced the launch of the newest version of their Header Bidding solution for Publishers, called PA Bidding v3. We discussed with Dimitris Tsoukalas, Regional Director MEA, how this solution will help Publishers in the current context.
1. Project Agora has been active as a major media technology solutions provider in our region since 2016 and has, over that period, launched a series of innovations for publishers and brands. What’s next, how’s the current outbreak impacting this?
PA Bidding version 3 is the newest version of our Header Bidding solution for publishers. Having implemented our technology in more than 1,500 websites across EMEA I can confidently say that we have a unique view of the publisher pain-points and opportunities. PA Bidding is built with Innovation, Revenue Growth and Simplicity in mind, to enable publishers to maximize their gain from Advertising Technology, on publishers’ terms. It is being supported end to end, from the initial onboarding to continuous optimization, by Project Agora’s team of 100 experts. In today’s environment where inventory is increasing significantly while advertising budgets are shrinking, incremental revenue generation and optimal resource allocation become critical.
2. You say “on publishers’ terms” —the terms publishers would most want to see this being applied to are in the revenue domain. How is PA Bidding impacting those?
We have been working on closed beta with key publisher groups on this latest version for the last six months. What we are seeing is a revenue growth boost that can reach up to 50%, depending on the publisher’s pre-existing set-up. This is largely due to higher bid density coming from a diverse set of exclusive local and international campaigns brought by our own sales teams, unique native advertising formats, real time competition from all the major DSP/SSP platforms and significant minimization of inventory leakages.
3. This still leaves issues of growing importance such as, say, ad blocking and AMP monetization —are you addressing these?
Yes, you are right. Advertising monetization has become a very complex technical operation with many different aspects that publishers have been struggling to keep up with. Monetization of AMP pages and ad-blocked inventory is definitely such a case, same with any industry initiatives around transparency and privacy that heavily impact monetization such as proper ads.txt implementation, CMP compliance, sellers json and the list goes on and grows every day. To be able to grow their revenue, a publisher needs to have a dedicated team of Research and Development professionals which is hard to find. This is where we come in to help as we work to develop and integrate different monetization elements under one unified solution.
4. Is it the case though that such an offering applies only to major publishers, those that have the resources to do what normally would be a quite gruelling onboarding process? Not to mention the tools to monitor all this…
We have a “deploy Immediately get peace of mind indefinitely”, commitment towards publishers of all different kind of verticals, countries and sizes. Setting up PA Bidding requires close to zero publisher involvement, as we have automated the onboarding and health audit process. All the maintenance (inclusive of new updates) and optimization work is also fully undertaken by Project Agora’s Publisher Success and Yield Optimization teams to create time for publishers to focus on what is important for them. Publishers still have control and visibility by using Project Agora’s Partner Center to monitor the performance of their websites and generate actionable insights for wider use.
5. How fast can this set-up be and how soon could a publisher hope to see a difference in the bottom line? Do you have experience to share in our or other markets?
One of the PA Bidding case studies we released last week is for the popular automotive site newsauto.gr, which belongs to one of the biggest publishing groups in South Europe (Proto Thema). Within a month from the implementation, which was completed in days with limited involvement on their side, they saw an increase of 28,2% in eCPM and a reduction of inventory leakage that exceeded 70%. Major sites in MENA such as Youm7 have also been upgraded to PA Bidding v3 this month and we are looking forward to educating the market with some regional case studies.
6. Wouldn’t all this mean more work and time invested down the line? Why should a publisher not rely only on the current set-up they have with Google Ad Manager?
Publishers are wary of solutions that are limiting their options. Using Google Ad Manager is a perfect choice if the publishers feel that it fulfills their use cases, but, relying only in one technology, leaves lots of money on the table. PA Bidding is a “technology neutral” solution that makes publishers secure that the never-ending, expensive catch-up race between various advertising technologies is being managed to their benefit, on their own terms. This is our “future proof guarantee”. Project Agora has the needed scale, focus and is investing heavily to stay on top of its game to help publishers control the future of advertising.
Learn more on how to grow the revenue of your website with PA Bidding.
