This article will dive into the intricacies of low fill rate and how Varrando can improve low video ad fill rate at VPAID level.
Reasons for low fill rate are multiple and diverse. I’ll touch base with many of them and focus in this article on what the industry calls unperformant or broken VPAIDs.
1. Why do ad ops see low fill rate?
As mentioned, reasons are multiple and diverse. I will only list several of the business reasons, as well, as our recommendations (where possible) of how to tackle this problem. I’m fairly sure, for the logistics side of ad trading, publishers have far more insights than we can provide at this point.
So, our two cents gathered from discussions with various industry parties. Reasons for low fill rate: emerging markets, shortage of publishers, wrong timeout settings, wrong geo-targeting settings, wrong target audience in general, quality of traffic, inventory source criteria too strict (media, format, duration, response time, etc), excessive pricing for unmet criteria, and even brand testing just to see how to better fluctuate in the future. And, the one that we are going to throughly debate: unperformant or broken VPAIDs.
Now, for the list of possible problems for low fill rate, our best (extremely simplified) short piece of advice from Ad Ops professionals on how to improve it: try to add more demand partners, if you have floor rate, try to decrease them. Also, performance and better traffic and better viewability do help along.
2. Back to VPAID and what exactly are unperformant or broken VPAIDs?
So, I’ve mentioned performance of the campaign as a factor in improving fill rate. One miss-match of the industry for a low perfromance is the way VPAIDs are being implemented all over the online advertising world. Especially in programmatic chains of ad calling.
According to IAB specifications for implementing VPAID ads, every each one VPAID should return an ad. In actuality, most VPAIDs return a “No Ad” response; try the next VAST/VPAID call. Easily imaginable, this chain can get as long as 20 empty VPAID ad calls until one ad is found. During this time, video player remains on loading, no ad impression is being fired, and users are for sure in other corners of the internet. You know, somewhere where they can interact with actual shown content and ad impressions are being counted.
Now, Varrando put its video advertising expertise into the game and offered a real solution to this issue. See below how.
3. How to Improve Low Video Ad Fill Rate at VPAID Level
Varrando, not only takes care of viewers, but makes sure ad impressions are fired even in the most unlikely of circumstances. Like in our example of 20 empty VPAID ad calls.
Firstly, Varrando InStream video player does not pause the video content while waiting for VPAID chains to load. Varrando InStream continues to play the content, while under the hood checking for ad calls. In this scenario, user is not chased away by empty looping players.
Secondly, or, perhaps more to the point, simultaneously, Varrando makes it possible to find an actual ad in multiple VPAIDs in the same time. Only when 1 VPAID is about to fire an impression, it pauses the content, AND loads a VPAID with an actual ad in it. Ad impression counted. Should Varrando find more than 1 ad impression during its check it will fire all of them before resuming content.
There is NO WAITING time for the user. Varrando makes these checks behind the scenes, and always plays either a piece of content or an ad.
Although this implementation sounds like an obvious solution, most video players on the market lack this feature completely. The way most video players, be it from ad servers or tech providers, work is to waterfall for an ad response. But, as I’ve described, this waterfalling approach, frequently results in:
- no ad impression
- no content shown
- users chased away
- ultimately, low fill rate
As always, Happy Campaigning!
