A First Price Auction Overview
(Part 1 of a 5 part series on Best Practices for First Price Auctions)
A few words up front. The move to a first price auction is controversial. In many cases, it has not even been up to the publishers. We have anecdotal evidence from some of our publisher clients that some of them literally woke up to have discovered that they were now using a first-price auction without their permission or knowledge (needless to say their demand partners didn’t know either and were asking questions quickly!). The above is a scenario we’d like to see avoided, as it could be very harmful to the long-term health of your demand partner ecosystem. This type of change, managed improperly, could destroy the trust of your buyers.
So the very first preparation you should make is to determine (if you don’t know) what type of auction you are currently running and if your SSP has visions of moving you over to a first price auction.
Once you have an understanding if these partners wish to move you to first price or you will indeed have a choice, you can begin planning.
In this series we will not debate the pros and cons of moving to first price. That’s a topic for another post. The scope of the content in this series is to help publishers manage the critical aspects of the migration to insure their demand remains strong during the migration and that their integrity as a supplier is not questioned.
Here are three principal areas to manage during the transition. We will cover each in subsequent posts:
- Demand Management
- Yield Management
- PMPs
- Monitoring with analytics