Example with 4 SSPs consulted before impression

Consulted SSPs during the auctionBid (CPM)

• ‍‍SSP1: Rubicon - 4$ (Winner!)
• SSP2: Appnexus - 3$
• SSP3: Index Exchange - 1$
• SSP4: Smart Adserver -no bid response

In this case the winner is Rubicon with a 4$ bid. In a first price Auction, Rubicon pays 4$ to the publisher. However, if Rubicon wasn’t taking part in the auction, Appnexus would have won the auction with its 3$ bid.

So, in the end, Rubicon generates 4$ in revenue, but if Rubicon wasn’t there, Appnexus would have made 3$ in revenue.

The unique value of Rubicon in this case is 1$.

If we sum up the auction process:

• Rubicon is the winner and generated 4$ in revenue,
• The unique value of Rubicon is only 1$ (which corresponds to the increment generated vs. the second highest bid: Appnexus),
• The unaffected value of Rubicon is 3$ (which corresponds to the revenue that would have been made anyway if Rubicon wasn’t there).

Of course, we could generalize this to all auctions and all bidders. So, if Rubicon is generating 100,000€ in revenue per month, you can split it in 60,000€ of unaffected value (the money that would have been made in any case without Rubicon) and 40,000€ of Unique Value (the sum of increments that Rubicon brings to every auctions).

You should also monitor that split by country, device, location, format, etc.

Most publishers only track and monitor revenue that is made by their bidders (which is important of course), but in an open programmatic market where all SSPs are connected to the same buyers, it’s almost as crucial to monitor the Unique Value vs. the Unaffected Value.

Here are 3 tips that can really make a difference:

• Improve your setup with every bidder in your stack, by understanding where they really over-perform competition and where they don’t.
• Keep alive bidders that generate a low overall revenue but with a high unique value.
• Disconnect bidders that generate low revenue, low unique value and slow down your pages.

Pubstack can help with those optimisations. Feel free to get in touch to discuss this topic!

More on this topic:

We’ve debunked a couple other myths around AdTech, most notably concerning Ad Refresh and its consequences for your stack. For example, the increasing use of managed wrappers has led people to believe setting up Ad Refresh properly is an easy task but it couldn’t be further away from the truth : Ad Refresh Myths: “Ad Refresh is easy to implement” (unless you use a no-code solution such as ours, of course 😉)

If you need to figure out which bidders are best for you, we’ve gathered our best practices to help publishers find the perfect SSP mix for their inventory : "The Perfect Mix of SSPs for Publishers"