If online advertising is growing so quickly, why does it feel like publishers are getting less? We have an answer to that question, and of course it revolves around data. Lotame believes there is no reason why publishers should be earning less. At a time when advertisers are laser-focused on finding content that resonates with, and engages their target audiences, media companies and other content-creators should be fetching premium rates. So how do you make this your reality?
Working with a data management platform (DMP) like Lotame is one surefire way to turn that possibility into a reality. By turning your data into insights, you can increase CPMs for everything you sell – regardless of whether it’s sold via direct or programmatic channels. Here’s how:
It starts with knowing your audience and how valuable they actually are. The right DMP will help you understand and segment your readers and viewers based on granular behaviors. Your sales team can then price and sell these audiences accordingly – instead of simply selling based on content or context. These packages can also be plugged into an SSP or other platform for programmatic access.
Think you don’t have enough impressions to fulfill a meaty RFP? A DMP can help. With Lotame’s data management platform, you can use our analytics tools to create lookalike and act-alike audience segments, enabling you to increase scale across your digital properties. You can then take the audience segments and run extension buys across the broader web. These tools enable you to go after – and secure – bigger deals with higher CPMs.
Let’s say you’re a travel website and that your sales team catches wind of a major RFP about to be distributed by a gaming company to support a new product launch. Your first-party data alone is unlikely to get you on the gaming company’s buy – maybe you can tick the box of “males aged 18-34” but you can’t address any of the other targeting criteria that they’re specifying. That’s where third-party data comes in.
By cookie-matching your first-party data with data from across our global third-party data exchange, you can uncover new insights into your existing audience. Third-party data might reveal, for example, that you have a high volume of users who over-index the rest of the Internet population when it comes to an interest in video games and computers and technology – two attributes that the gaming company has stipulated as important targeting criteria for their campaign. Suddenly your audience becomes very valuable to the gaming company, which increases the likelihood of you making it onto the buy.
These third-party insights can be a goldmine for your business. Not only do they enable your sales team to pitch non-endemic advertisers, which helps increase sell-through rates, but they also enable you to raise the CPMs you charge, by allowing you to create niche and highly valuable new audience segments.
By layering third-party data from Lotame’s global data exchange on top of your existing first-party data, you can uncover deeper audience insights. These insights will allow your sales team to pitch non-endemic advertisers outside the content categories that typically align with your brand. A weather website for example, may use third-party data to reveal that they have a high proportion of in-market car buyers visiting their site. Using these insights, the sales team can go after advertisers in the automotive category and increase CPMs for this highly valuable audience.
Lotame’s Device Graph is a tool that uses deterministic and probabilistic matching to connect users across desktop and mobile devices. By creating a unified view of consumers and enabling true cross-screen targeting and optimization, you’ll be able to increase sell-through rates and command higher CPMs.
It may seem mythical, but it’s a reality for our clients. We worked with PilotOnline, a regional news publisher to help them achieve 100% sell through of their digital inventory – something the company hadn’t achieved in over 20 years.
To find out more about how Lotame can help you increase your CPMs, contact us today.