additional sources of ad buyers. With this ... Initially, a small number of pricing tiers were set up, with line ... Hol
CASE STUDY
MAXIMIZING YIELD across all SALES CHANNELS Townhall is a leading political Web site in the US, providing conservative news, political commentary and analysis. They operate a number of websites, including the popular political blog Hot Air, in addition to their flagship Townhall site. Townhall and Rubicon Project have a long-standing and successful partnership enabling Townhall to make the most of their unsold inventory, and to provide additional sources of ad buyers. With this strong partnership, Townhall was among the first of Rubicon Project’s customers to fully implement the innovative Real-Time Pricing feature, working closely with Rubicon Project to roll it out across their properties to maximize the overall yield of their ad sales.
Goals Every customer using Real-Time Pricing has different goals, different composition of direct and indirect buyer channels, and different overall strategies and approaches for selling their digital inventory. Rubicon Project worked closely with Townhall on the implementation of Real-Time Pricing to help tailor the rollout to Townhall’s specific objectives: • Increase overall revenue, while maintaining steady direct sales revenue. • Increase the fill rate of Rubicon Project’s high-value line items, reducing the frequency at which Rubicon Project needs to pass back to Townhall’s ad server. • Maximize competition across all of Townhall’s indirect sales channels, ensuring that inventory not sold directly is yielding the greatest possible revenue from the secondary sales channel.
Set-Up Townhall implemented the Real-Time Pricing JavaScript tag across their sites. This tag informs their ad server of the open marketplace value of each impression in real time. Line items were set up in their ad server targeted to these different levels of value. This ensures that, at times when the Rubicon Project marketplace is likely to return high bids for an impression, these impressions can be sent to Rubicon Project. In cases where the www.rubiconproject.com
Rubicon Project marketplace is not likely to return high bids, the impression can be given to another line item in the Townhall ad server. Initially, a small number of pricing tiers were set up, with line items targeted to each level in the ad server. However, due to strong results in the initial rollout, the implementation was subsequently expanded to include more pricing tiers and the corresponding line items targeted to those tiers.
Results Real-Time Pricing has proven to be quite successful in helping Townhall achieve their goals, helping to maximize the effectiveness and yield of their indirect sales channel. • Fill rate through Rubicon Project has increased dramatically, more than doubling since RealTime Pricing was implemented. The frequency of impressions getting passed back into Townhall’s ad server has been greatly reduced. • The eCPM Townhall is achieving through Rubicon Project has also increased significantly, gaining over 30� since rollout. • Holistic revenue across all of Townhall’s ad business has maintained strong levels, even through their typical off-season. Being a political site, election times are Townhall’s peak season(s). This RealTime Pricing implementation happened to fall outside of an election time. But with this feature, Townhall’s overall revenue remained steady from their peak season through their off-season, though their normal pattern would be a seasonal revenue dip. • Competition is being successfully optimized, ensuring each impression is going to the most suitable demand source, where optimal yield can be achieved.
Conclusion Real-Time Pricing has provided Townhall with a powerful solution to help make the most of their indirect sales channel. This feature has proven to be a good fit, performing strongly on all of the goals Townhall laid out. Rubicon Project and Townhall are excited to continue using Real-Time Pricing to help drive advertising success in innovative ways.
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