Programmatic advertising platforms are like cars. They all do basically the same thing, but each offers different features and widely varying levels of quality. You wouldn’t buy a car that didn’t have windshield wipers (we hope), but if you did, you would still technically have everything you needed to get from point A to point B. You just might risk a crash if the weather gets rough.

In the same way, most programmatic advertising platforms technically have all the tools to bring in ad revenue for publishers, but some have features that are going to make it a lot easier to bring in and maximize revenue.

In this post, we explore five of the most important features to look for in your chosen platform for programmatic advertising. Read on to learn more.

To start maximizing your revenue today, reach out to the programmatic advertising experts at Playwire.

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Programmatic Advertising: What Publishers and Advertisers Need to Know

Read the guide and stop wasting revenue on programmatic done wrong.

Real-Time Analytics

Here’s the thing: ad tech professionals know what they’re doing when it comes to fancy technology. For them, giving publishers a way to see who is buying their ad inventory and what kind of ad inventory is selling in real time is no problem. It’s not rocket science - it’s a relatively entry-level feature all programmatic ad platforms should have.

That means any programmatic ad platform you are using or considering is either intentionally trying to keep you in the dark, or simply haven’t put the effort in to raise those analytics to a dashboard, if they don’t have a way for you to get real-time analytics. The ability to assess your revenue efforts and make changes on the fly is key to maximizing your revenue.

Keeping Your Data Safe

Let’s take a moment to make sure you understand what all publishers should know in 2021: your first-party data is valuable. With the age of the third-party cookie in full decline, the data you have about your users is more valuable than ever and is going to continue gaining value.

It’s like gold. If you had gold, wouldn’t you want to keep it safe? 

Ask yourself how the programmatic advertising platforms you use will keep your data safe from theft and loss. Most platforms will gladly take your data and use it to get higher-value buys from advertisers and agencies. That’s a good thing. But if they lose it or abuse it, you have lost a great deal.

Brand-Safe Content

The beauty of programmatic advertising is that it takes a lot of the tedious details out of your hands. That’s also a risk. Because you aren’t reviewing every single buy (and buyer), you don’t know exactly what kinds of ads are going to show up on your site. Ad content that isn’t brand-safe can harm your audience and even set you up for some legal liability.

As you search for programmatic advertising platforms, it’s important to look for a platform that shares your belief that brand safety is essential. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a rule, and it should never be broken. 

This is one major part of programmatic advertising that shouldn’t be automated. A strong programmatic advertising platform will use actual human beings and a third party brand safety partner to ensure that every ad that runs on your site is brand-safe. 

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Compliance With All Digital Ad Standards

Ever heard of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ruling? Do you know what COPPA stands for? (It’s the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.) How about Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) compliance?  

Those are just a small sample of the laws, rules and guidelines that your site, and the ads that run on it, need to comply with. And those are the relatively straightforward ones - don’t even get us started on OpenRTB protocols.

Why are we shouting acronyms at you right now? Because someone - either you or your programmatic advertising platform - has to comply with all of them. Here’s a hint: it should be the platform. Your programmatic partner needs to not only have an expert-level understanding of all of these sets of rules but also be able to demonstrate how their platform ensures 100% compliance.

A Turnkey Platform

This isn’t so much a feature of programmatic advertising platforms as it is an important descriptor: the platform you choose should be a turnkey solution to programmatic advertising. They should handle every aspect of your programmatic sales efforts. You have enough on your plate as a publisher. You certainly don’t have time to figure out header bidding adapters, how to stick to all of the ad industry rules and guidelines and how to maximize your revenue on a minute-by-minute basis.

All of that is your programmatic platform’s job. Call it turnkey, plug and play, one-stop shopping or whatever you like - the point is that your chosen platform should make programmatic advertising simple for you. 

Playwire: the Publisher-First Programmatic Advertising Platform

We just covered a lot of ground, but these five features are not too much to ask of programmatic advertising platforms. In our opinion, the features we discussed above are the bare minimum. Any platform that fails to deliver any of these features is not putting you, the publisher, first.

At Playwire, we put publishers first. To truly do that, we have to provide the best programmatic advertising platform on the market. With our Revenue Amplification Managed by Professionals (RAMP) platform, we believe we’ve done that. RAMP handles every aspect of your programmatic advertising efforts, among other revenue-generating methods, by implementing cutting-edge and tried-and-true advertising technologies that are designed to ensure you get nothing less than maximum revenue.

To learn more about how we help publishers earn more through programmatic advertising, speak with our helpful team today. Give us a call at 1-561-206-4621 or contact us online.

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