Five Prebid Optimisation Tips & Tricks

There are numerous settings, both big and small, within Prebid that make it possible to optimise your setups. Despite the presence of ‘tricks' in the title, all the topics that we cover below are accepted techniques or overlooked issues. A responsible Ad Tech lead should always consider the long-term effects of changes when analysing how to generate high revenues to avoid being excluded by buyers because of short-term wins.

1. Long Price Range and Small Increments with Price Buckets

While auditing and onboarding clients, the experts at Relevant Digital regularly encounter too simplified Prebid price bucket setups that lead to constant losses of revenue. In practice, this means that the highest price bucket range stops too early or the increments are too wide within the competitive bid range and even beyond that.

Issues to consider:

• Excessive looseness in price bucket granularity can result in losses in price bucket granularity since bids are always rounded down to the nearest price increment. 
• Ending your price bucket range prematurely can have consequences for buyers who rely on high bids for retargeting and other high-interest audiences. In real life scenario, this could result in 40€ CPMs being reduced to 20€ CPMs due to having too short of a price range. Although higher bids may not require small price increments, having excessively loose increments can still lead to losses as bids are rounded down between the price increments.
  
  
  2. Timeouts

Issues with too short Timeout:

• SSPs don't have enough time to conduct the auction process, and thus competition will be reduced and the CPM of winning bids will be lower.
• In a more pessimistic scenario, no SSP will have time to conduct the auction process, and the ad unit will remain sold altogether.

Issues with too long Timeout:

• Users will leave the web page before the ad will be displayed.
• Viewability will suffer as users will scroll past or leave the page soon after the ad is displayed.
• Quality of user experience lowers as ads are loaded much later than other content.

3. Ad Unit Sizes and Accepted Ad Sizes

Do your ad units accept all the common ad sizes that fit within the ad unit’s height and width? If not, you are definitely losing out on potential revenue. Although this is nothing new, it is something that will need to be configured in order to work. 

• You might also want to consider different regional sizes in your accepted sizes. For information on various ad sizes, take a look at the IAB specifications and guidance from major players like Google.
• One issue to consider when accepting multiple-sized creatives in one ad unit is how much space is reserved for the ad unit on the page. It is recommended to always reserve space equal to the maximum size of the ad unit. This is due to the Cumulative Layout Shift metric in Google’s Core Web Vitals, which measures how much the page layout changes while it is open in the browser. Having more cumulative layout shifts negatively affects the website’s search rankings and the user experience for visitors.

4. Adding Prebid User ID Module

If you have not yet added the Prebid User ID Module, now might be a good time to consider it!

In our experience, the results of this have not been huge but are still measurable. Of course, the exact future of Universal IDs, Google’s Privacy Sandbox APIs, and other initiatives remain uncertain. However, it is still important to be prepared and work with what brings results today. Check out the key data trends for Publishers in 2023.

It is also crucial to consider the potential impact on future results. If you are uncertain about the effects of any legitimate options, you should run tests to assess the impact in your specific case. Additionally, there may be regional differences in how IDs work, so testing is essential to determine the best approach for your setup.

5. Using a Tool to Optimise and Configure Your Prebid Setup

Implementing the aforementioned and other Prebid optimisations is possible in various ways. As the providers of Header Bidding Manager and other Relevant Yield suite services, we naturally recommend using our tool to exclude heavy manual tasks and have more resources for revenue generation.

How, you may ask? 

All of the configurations that used to be done by engineers will now be in the hands of your Ad Operations & Yield team, without touching a line of complex code. Not only will your specialists be more proactive and advanced in their skills, but your engineers will also have more time to work on product development. Sounds like a Win-Win, exactly how Nextday Media increased their revenue by 41% in the challenging year 2020, using Relevant Yield.

We strongly recommend utilising Relevant Yield, or any similar tool, to simplify and streamline the management of your Prebid setup, making it no longer a hassle. Normal human behaviour applies here, just as it does elsewhere: when making changes is easy, you are more likely to actually implement them rather than just consider them.