What Every Publisher Should Demand From Their Wrapper Management Provider
Wrapper management providers sit at the center of publishers’ programmatic monetization strategies, and are responsible for helping publishers navigate everything from identity to new formats. Given that, it’s vitally important that your wrapper management provider delivers enterprise-level reliability, scale, and expertise — not all wrapper solutions are created equal, nor should they be something that are set and forgotten about.
Over the past three months, Magnite has released several major Demand Manager innovations that radically change the impact a wrapper management solution can have on maximizing publisher revenue. Here are a few features that we’ve built to provide the robustness and reliability that we think are necessary when managing a publisher’s wrapper.
Microwrappers
To achieve better performance from the page, the wrapper needs to be finely tuned to the page it’s serving on. Prebid has grown and evolved significantly over the past year — and it’s gotten large enough that wrapper management systems need to be aware of the environment that they’re serving into (like user device or geo) and send wrappers appropriate to those contexts — otherwise they might be adding additional latency to the page that can have a negative impact on revenue. Demand Manager’s new microwrappers deliver the right wrapper to the right page at the right time on an impression-by-impression basis.
Robust A/B Testing Framework
Wrapper management providers talk a lot when it comes to A/B testing. But the power of A/B testing all comes down to the robustness, flexibility, and vastness of your A/B testing framework. Demand Manager’s new A/B testing framework allows you to measure and change any component of a wrapper without using JavaScript, which puts additional strain on the user’s browser.
Every component of your wrapper should be tested in every context, and your wrapper management strategy should be built around measuring the marginal utility of every alteration you make to your wrappers. We have found that changing the conversation from “what happens if I add a single additional bidder to 50% of my traffic” to “I have a new bidder that my team would like to work with, let me test four different combinations of wrapper settings” is more conducive to seeing how various combinations of settings perform in a head-to-head test. This way, a publisher can isolate different parameters that can impact revenue, including things like:
- Client vs server configuration
- Bidder set
- Timeouts
- Multi-format ad units
- Geo targeting
- Layout targeting
It’s perfectly possible that just adding a bidder to 50% of traffic misses out on specific opportunities where they can add value — simultaneously, manually testing all of the possible parameters that need to operate in concert one at a time (because variables need to be isolated) is tedious without an A/B system built to construct multiple independent tests.
You should be able to run unlimited simultaneous tests with a powerful analytics system that breaks out revenue from ALL sources, not just header bidding, to determine what is driving meaningful changes in your revenue.
Holistic, Real-Time Reporting
A wrapper management solution should be the core centralization point for all of your programmatic data. This means your solution must incorporate data from as many sources as possible to inform decisions that extend well beyond wrapper configuration, including traffic acquisition, user experience, and direct sales.
Demand Manager’s reporting solution, Prebid Analytics, provides near real-time data availability that supports the iterative nature of A/B testing to quickly validate the effect of system optimizations. It supports advanced Google Ad Manager reporting that tells you, on an impression-by-impression basis, which monetization source won an impression—be it direct sales, Google Ad Exchange, or header bidding.
Beyond wrapper performance metrics, Prebid Analytics contextualizes these dimensions against user performance—your bidder timeouts and revenue don’t matter if they’re negatively affecting your user session length and average impressions per session.
Finally, Prebid Analytics provides a robust, scalable infrastructure for visualizing key-value data that allows you to customize your reporting across different inventory and audience segments. The ability to assess performance across page type, time of day, authors, etc. (any dimension that is important to you) results in data that can provide insights to drive strategy and make meaningful optimizations across inventory. And Prebid Analytics doesn’t struggle with multiple overlapping KV pairs — you can report on up to five different keys at once!
The Bottom Line
By expanding the goal beyond header bidding monetization, you can start to inform decisions across your broader business.
At first glance, Prebid wrapper management solutions may look very similar, but the devil is in the details — not all analytics systems or A/B testing systems were built the same or allow you to do the same things. They actually differ greatly and publishers are doing themselves a huge disservice if they don’t demand more from their wrapper management providers. Only Demand Manager delivers the most important features every publisher must have:
- Microwrappers intelligently deliver the right wrapper to the right page at the right time.
- Granular and robust A/B testing framework allows you to isolate a single change and test it against other configurations.
- Holistic reporting across all bidders to support user session monetization reporting.
If your wrapper provider can’t deliver an enterprise class solution with these key features, you are missing out on the full upside potential of your Prebid implementation.
If you’d like to learn more about how to achieve better results with your wrapper management solution, please reach out to us at contact@magnite.com.