Advertising Yield Management: Guide for Publishers

Symmetriq
4 min readNov 16, 2020
Symmetriq Order Management System

Publishers are in search of the promised land to perfect yield management and have always been elusive to get there. Order Management System is an essential part of the overall yield management workflow enabling publishers with all the data required to perfect the process. Yield Management in adtech is complex in comparison to other optimization methods available. Yield Management is commonly referred to as Revenue Management with direct relation to pricing.

Publishers deploy numerous optimization methods across multiple business functions to run a profitable advertising business. Yield Management, if done correctly, has a direct impact on the top line driving significant revenue to the publishers.

Table of Contents

  • What is Yield Management
  • Advertising Metrics that matter
  • Impact of unsold inventory
  • About Symmetriq

What is Yield Management?

Advertising inventory available with publishers is limited and is extremely perishable with almost no shelf life. While the supply is limited and steady, however, the demand varies significantly. The publishers aim to sell all of the inventories on the properties at the highest prices. Selling the available products at all times is one of the significant problems that plague the publishers.

Yield management is a complex technical process that involves being able to foretell the demand and manage inventory. Being able to forecast inventory correctly and manage the sales pipeline effectively becomes two levers for an effective yield management strategy. Publishers can maximize yield only by allocating inventory in the areas where the demand seems to be highest. The only way for publishers to effectively deploy their products is by having complete visibility into their revenue across all channels.

The means of increasing revenue in the course of execution of inventory control and pricing strategy is advertising yield management. If a publisher is looking to effectively en-cash their offerings, the best popular solution is yield management.

Advertising Metrics that Matter

For the execution of any optimization strategy, data is the ingredient part that is vital to making or breaking the optimization. Advertising sales and revenue data is the key to see fruitful results. Publishers need an effective order management system to start in the first step of perfecting yield management.

Publishers need a single operating system for running the advertising business to ensure a single source of truth. For effective yield management, publishers also need the full product catalog with the history of sales data for the products. Understand which products, pages, sections, and targeting profiles are driving the highest and lowest revenue by the hour, day, week, month, and year.

In addition to the revenue data, publishers should also measure the sell-through rate for different products in the product catalog. Also, measure and understand your floor pricing, ceiling pricing, and discounts to get a 360-degree view of the revenue. All of the above data points will provide insights and drive the right yield management strategy.

Impact of Unsold Inventory

Measuring, analyzing, and optimizing yield based on pricing, cost method like eCPM and fill rare are essential, but don’t forget to measure the lost opportunity and the discounting as well. Unsold inventory affects the overall revenue as much as sold inventory.

Define the right calculations for your eCPM, sell-through, fill rate, and revenue recognition to forecast total ad revenue. Measuring lost opportunity allows for greater insight into trends and more intelligent media sales planning for the future.

About Symmetriq

Symmetriq is an Omni Channel Advertising Revenue Management platform allowing you to unify inventory, manage quote to cash, and maximize revenue across OTT, Digital, Linear, and Print in a Single Cloud-Based SaaS Advertising Revenue Management platform. Symmetriq was born out of the need to provide tools, technologies, and platforms to enable media companies to manage and run a profitable advertising business. Our omnichannel advertising revenue management platform is built natively on the cloud leveraging the latest web technologies with the scale being the primary driver without compromising security and compliance that has become paramount in the current privacy-first world. With Symmetriq, you can:

  • Scale your ad sales
  • Streamline your ad operations
  • Reduce your leaky revenue bucket
  • Get complete visibility on your revenue
  • Manage multiple rate cards as your business scales
  • Customize your product catalog based on your business requirements
  • Measure the health of your advertising business in real-time

We help leading publishers across the globe manage advertising business in a single platform enabling them to run a profitable media business. For any queries, please reach out to info@symmetriq.io.

https://symmetriq.io/advertising-yield-management-order-management-system

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Symmetriq

Advertising Revenue Management Platform enabling media companies to efficiently and effectively manage and run a profitable media business.