Improving the Efficiency of RTB Pipes with DSPs

Post on May 9, 2018 by Ankur Srivastava

Ankur Srivastava Director, Product Management- Ad Server

At PubMatic, we are passionate about keeping our programmatic ecosystem healthy and efficient while optimizing our connection with partners. The reason is simple: it’s a win-win for everyone involved and brings more scale to programmatic advertising.

With the proliferation of header bidding and the ever-increasing volume of ad impressions, DSPs have seen their infrastructure costs rising. All this while advertising demand has not necessarily increased at the same pace.

PubMatic has been cognizant of this potential imbalance and we have focused on building solutions to help ease the load on DSP infrastructure and optimize the supply path. Below are few meaningful steps we have taken in this direction to benefit our partners:

Highly Optimized Connection Management

We have made improvements in the way we open connections with DSPs for RTBs and consequently, we use the minimum number of connections. This helps DSPs be more efficient as they need less infrastructure to support our impression volume.

Sophisticated Bid Throttling

We strive to send only the most relevant traffic to DSPs. To that effect, we automatically throttle the traffic which DSPs are unlikely to bid upon. Our solution has matured over time and we have seen a significant reduction in wasteful QPSs with DSPs.

Automated QPS Management

DSPs often have QPS thresholds to protect their infrastructure from getting bombarded with more queries than it can handle. We built an automated QPS management layer that reacts to real-time QPS fluctuations and leverages machine learning to figure out pockets of inventory that can be throttled to stay within the QPS allocated by DSPs.

Bid Compression

PubMatic supports bid request compression using Gzip and can read the Gzipped responses from DSPs. The reduced payload size lessens the burden on the network I/O of DSPs and reduces timeouts with DSPs.

Ads.txt support

We have been encouraging ads.txt adoption with our partners and recently provided an implementation guide to help. DSPs today can choose to receive traffic from PubMatic based on a publisher’s ads.txt status. This helps DSPs lower QPS (queries per second) by eliminating unnecessary queries, depending on how they approach ads.txt.

DSP Benefits

We believe SSPs and exchanges should focus on maximizing the value of RTB pipes with DSPs. This is the foundation on which programmatic growth relies. Clearly, additional improvements can be made, and we are working tirelessly towards our goal of optimizing the supply chain of ad-tech. To learn more about our products or technology, check out our solutions or contact us.