Optimizing timeouts for more ad revenues without hurting user experience is a brain-teaser for every publisher. Through this case, we will demonstrate how Pubstack helped a publisher achieve a 100K€ yearly uplift without impacting the user experience.
The publisher has an average timeout of 12% on different bidders. Its global prebid timeout parameter is 2000ms.
The publisher doesn’t want to increase the timeout parameter too much as he is afraid this would decrease the viewability of his inventory, and he also wants to avoid increasing his page loading time.
He decides to use Pubstack to optimize his timeouts without affecting his viewability nor the user experience.
With an average timeout rate of 12%, this publisher loses between 10% and 15% of its annual programmatic revenue which represents around 200k€ and 300k€.
The first step in this optimization process is to identify the source of these timeouts.
With granular data, the publisher is able to identify very precisely the source of these timeouts.
We can clearly see that a large part of the said timeouts can be attributed to mobile traffic.
By increasing the timeout parameter in Prebid by 700ms, only on mobile, the timeout rate decreases to 10% on average.
After applying the changes mentioned earlier, the uplift is confirmed, and the impact on visibility is negligible or even non-existent. This represents an uplift of about 100k€ per year.
The problem can be completely erased with further improvements like page loading optimization, timeout per geo, etc. These optimizations can easily be set-up with Pubstack.
And this just one optimization out of several others Pubstack allows you to achieve.
As we’ve just seen, timeouts can make or break your monetisation and have a huge influence on the revenue generated across your inventory. However this is just one of the features offered by Prebid over which you have control as a publisher. To learn more about other features and how to avoid Prebid integration issues, read our dedicated Business Case : Prebid integration issue.
If you’d like to learn about a real-life application of our timeout optimisation, where our solution helped the publisher reduce timeouts by 45% across all of his websites, read our SLM Ads Use Case !
