Case Study: Automated Traffic Curation

Cutting Edge Technology for Optimal Traffic Curation with Smaato

Automated Traffic Curation (ATC) is a machine learning (ML) technology tool which optimizes traffic and significantly reduces the costs of managing programmatic bidding for demand-side platforms (DSPs). ATC estimates the interest in the bid request based on bidding behavior and streamlines DSP traffic accordingly. Decreasing less-desirable traffic allows marketers to save costs, while maintaining access to new, relevant inventory.

Why is ATC a must-have for marketers?

There are many advantages of optimized traffic curation. Primarily, it helps to increase performance and decreases infrastructure costs. It also allows marketers access to more relevant inventory, while limiting less desirable traffic.

ATC continuously monitors bidding patterns so traffic curation happens in real time. ATC allows marketers to:

• Optimize settings to access high-value inventory
• Reach more relevant audiences and raise campaign ROI
• Reduce overhead costs by filtering out irrelevant traffic

By scanning bidding behavior, the ATC algorithm identifies the most valuable inventory — saving marketers time and money. By reviewing and gathering this data on a continuous basis, DSPs that enable ATC will see continuous improvements in the requests and traffic that they receive from the Smaato platform.

The Smaato Demand Solution (SDX) has powerful targeting parameters that allow DSPs to set filters by ad format, location data, device OS, app, and more. ATC applies those filters to all outgoing bid requests, ensuring that DSPs will only see the filtered traffic that matches their set parameters. Recently Smaato added customized approaches and updated measurement KPIs. Read on to find out how select accounts saw impressions and bid rate skyrocket, while infrastructure cost went down.

Marketer A: ATC was enabled on March 4th 2021, resulting in an immediate optimization impact of 120% higher impressions (monthly average) and 28% lower bid requests (=less cost).

The bid rate for Marketer A increased by 230% when they started to receive more relevant traffic.

Now able to reach more relevant audiences, Marketer A saw more benefits in the off-season than they did during the high-performing holiday season. The below graph indicates the impact of enabling ATC. It demonstrates more impressions in April than in December with QPS set to 10K.

Marketer B: ATC was optimized on April 12th, resulting in a 75% increase in impressions. The amount of requests decreased by 5% due to the strict QPS settings (65K).

The bid rate for Marketer B increased 117% after receiving more relevant traffic.

Since Marketer B implemented a stricter QPS on Smaato’s Platform, they still saw more impressions despite slightly less traffic. In the graph, note the numbers from December (high season) and May (mid-season). Even though comparing Q4 (high season) to Q2 (mid-season), they saw higher impressions and bid rates.

ATC is enabled by default unless otherwise requested by marketers. Please reach out to your account manager to learn more.