DMP for publishers in India, How and who can gain: An audience buyer’s perspective

After spending a year on programmatic buy side with ATD- AMNET and having spent over a decade with leading publishers in India selling inventory, managing pricing & yield and knowing what it takes to build behavioural targeting. I am so glad to see that some of the publishers in India are taking right steps forward with DMP to increase monetisation opportunities.Let me take a few steps back and put some basic information on role of DMP for Publishers in India.

1) Visitors Persona, Behaviour Identification:

Most of the premium or niche content sites in India have user registration, thru which they are able to capture demographics of the users. DMP takes us to the next level in identifying behaviour, personas of your site visitors in terms of what they do in internet space, what are their content & commerce interest areas in an anonymised way using 3rd party data alongwith data information available thru your website in terms of content, clicksteam & registration data etc.

e.g. let’s say http://www.babycenter.in/ thru registration data is able to identify and segment visitors into 3 buckets:

a) Expectant mothersb) New mothersc) Mothers with toddlers

Now using 3rd party data thru DMP say for segment c) reveals that mothers with toddlers are also keenly interested in medicine and remedies or for that matters have been buying diapers of XYZ brands. Now these additional information about segment c) can be utilised by publisher in many ways besides serving them highly targeted ads at a premium price.

2. Audience Extension: Say in above example for segment c) they have only 0.5 million unique mothers who have been buying diapers and they can serve only 2 Million ad impression. Using DMP and DSP they can increase these numbers:

a) Using DSPs, they can follow these 0.5 Mn unique mothers to other sites in open exchange and serve more ad impressions (which they can buy at cheaper rates in open exchange) say 5 Million and hence increase monetisable ad inventory to a larger size.

b) Using DMP and 3rd party data, they can also acquire more users of segment c) by targeting campaigns with their lookalike behaviour attributes.

3. Allow you to Sell Audience Data in an Anonymised way:Pubs can also sell their audience data to marketers thru data exchanges without disclosing their identity, this data is always anonymised. Say in above example, data of segment C would be great interest to diaper sellers or e-commerce sites looking to sell diapers of size M/L. Yes, depending on granularity of data one can actually go down to the level of targeting users with specific size of diapers.

4. Content delivery Optimisation/ Personalisation: By know you have acquired ability thru DMP to identify persona, interest of visitors, you can easily serve most relevant content to them when they hit your website, visitors don’t have to be logged in users.You may at times be actually surprised to know not so obvious interest affinities of a particular segment say like their interest in technology or for that matters Brands like Apple.

Now coming to the main theme of this post:How should publishers in India leverage DMP for audience creation and monetisation?

I. Create Commercially Beneficial Audience Segments:One must understand digital demand side before investing into building up audience buckets, Unlike TV where GEC is valued most due to higher reach, Internet buyer in India doesn’t value entertainment, music content as some categories like Travel, automobile, technology, Banking, Insurance etc. given it is not yet seen as reach builder. Your content and audience strategy has to be also aligned to Internet commercial categories Unless you are online Video content publisher and can deliver substantial reach to complement TV buys, there also you would have higher success by focusing towards women centric content or something cricket as FMCG buyers have emerged out as large consumers of online video to complement TV reach. For audience supply side understanding, here is an example from one of the DMPs: Click on Asia Map and look for India.Having a good understanding of commercially beneficial audience segments is the key. Top selling audience categories at parent levels for India have been:

Travel News Computers & Tech Online shopping Gender-Female Parenting

This may change as we get more granular audience targeting data going forward.Also you may want to refer to trends for APAC as a whole in the latest release from Eyeota on APAC Audience categories for 2015

Quiz time folks ….Any guess on how much a Travel Insurance advertiser spend per click on google search for “Travel Insurance” in India ?

I can bet that you will be surprised, give google keyword planner a try now !

II. Build Parent Categories > Child Categories:An audience bucket as large as Automobile might get you descent CPMs, at the same time sub categories like SUV, Sedan, Hatchbacks are likely to get you even better CPMs. Or if you have travel audience, further segment them by destination, Domestic v/s International traveller, by Hotel or air ticket buyers, by types of vacations, types of travellers etc.

III. Invest in Data Modelling:A pure context/ visit based audience bucket may not satisfy buyers end objective, adding recency & frequency alone may not help build best of the breed audience buckets. You should consider adding more signals like ads clicked, searches made, downloads, transactions and leverage analytical tools, data scientist (Yes, large publishers are hiring ‘em) to further differentiate between interest (in market) and intent (affinity) of users and classify them accordingly, this will not only help you get differentiated pricing but also let buyers know what they are buying upfront.

You can also use DMP even if you are not serving ads on your website:https://www.indianrealestateforum.com/Popularly known as IREF, IREF is perhaps most valued RE investment forum. Hierarchically also this site is nicely organised and captures visitors browsing and interaction ( posting questions, answers) intent data points, they can create highly commercial audience buckets and monetise them by serving ads outside IREF or for that matters leveraging this audience data intelligence to drive highly pin pointed customers to relevant content, listings on housing.com itself.

Interested in exploring DMPs? Hang on …..There’s a cost of using DMP besides other related investments & education and the costs can be recovered only over a period of time. I would recommend read, research..go thru some of researches like these to first figure out what is it that you are looking for ? if you have questions regarding should you be open to selling inventory in first place, please visit my earlier post : Programmatic buying for publishers in India

Please feel free to comment, participate, and Share this thread, Happy to hear your views.Disclaimer: These are my own views and doesn’t necessarily reflects that of AMNET.Thanks youSumit Aggarwal+91-9820231335