Pubstack empowers M6 Publicité with real-time analytics to monitor their metrics of consented traffic vs consentless traffic.
Starting April 2021, a “refuse all” cookie button became mandatory in all Consent Management Platforms in France in order to comply with French data protection regulations. As a result, consentless traffic increased in the advertising market, and publishers were forced to look for new monetization solutions for this part of their inventory.
While putting in place a cookie wall or a paywall has been highly adopted by many Publishers, the french Publisher M6 Publicité was looking for a different way to monetize its consentless traffic and keep serving its readers with free content on its websites.
M6 Publicité owns and monetizes websites like CuisineAZ, PasseportSanté, RTL, Turbo.fr, among many others, and its consentless traffic usually represents around 20% of the total audience.
‘The issue of consentless ad delivery is a fairly recent problem and mostly limited to the French market. Given this, we had some troubles when looking for technical partners that supported us on this transition’
Mathieu Ho Thanh – Technical Programmatic Director
In order to monetize their consentless traffic, M6 needed to avoid calling their AdServer – Google Ad Manager – as it was not compliant with consentless traffic. Therefore, M6 decided to use a prebid render directly on its different pages.
For this, M6 Publicité split each bidder into two adapters (for consent vs. consentless traffic) and duplicated all SSP placements. As a result, on the SSP side, they had, for instance, one placement called banner_ATF and another placement called banner_ATF_consentless.
This split mainly gave M6 Publicité four main advantages:
In addition to that, to compensate for the loss of user information on cookie-less, M6 decided to enrich bid requests by adding contextual information passed via key/value. Using contextual insights improved M6 monetization as they were providing buyers with new information.
Finally, as the AdServer was not involved in the call, a real-time monitoring tool was needed to aggregate all the SSPs data and to track possible discrepancies with them. M6 Publicité decided to use Pubstack’s reports to monitor in real-time and with the granularity needed, many different metrics – such as auctions, winning bids, impressions, and revenues among others – on consent vs consentless traffic across all SSPs.
Pubstack provides GDPR information based on each auction, which allows Publishers to have a real overview of its traffic whereas the CMP usually provides user-based information rather than auction-based. Also, Pubstack gives the possibility to Publishers to compare Prebid impressions and revenues to SSPs’ data and to calculate and adjust possible discrepancies on consentless traffic.
“Thanks to its cookieless and consentless script, as well as its competent team with vast knowledge on the French market, Pubstack resulted to be the right partner to accompany us on this challenge.”
Mathieu Ho Thanh – Technical Programmatic Director
Prebid auctions on consentless traffic have been growing since May 2021, passing from 12% to 17% of the Publisher’s traffic in December 2021.
By monetizing the consentless traffic with this setup, M6 Publicité managed to recover 27% of the value of a user if he had given consent. All this value is incremental revenue, representing an extra uplift of +7% of ad revenue.
M6 Publicité keeps testing and adding more SSPs to monetize consentless traffic better. With their current setup, three main bidders (specialized in native and out-stream) are bringing 90% of the total revenue without consent.
If you’d like to know more on Pubstack’s customers and how they’ve adapted our solution to their individual situations, have a look at the following use cases :
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