Commentary

Excel's Long-Tail Black Hole

For many advertisers, 50% of programmatic ad buys have a single destination: nowhere. It might sound clichéd, but if you’re not minding the shop, half of your programmatic buying could be wasted.

If you have ever seen a report from your agency or DSP that includes a line item for "long tail," "aggregate" or some other indication that there are too many sites to include in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, then you may have found your black hole.

I remember back when DoubleClick reported the sites in its network at a mere count of 2,000. I used to think, "Wow, that's a lot of Web sites." Then along came blogs and myriad other content sites that began to draw significant audiences. The number of ad-supported Web sites ballooned to well over a million. Ad networks and ad exchanges were created to make buying easier as Internet audiences continued to blossom, expand and fragment.

Today, there are more ad-supported Web sites than rows that Excel can provide. For example, my latest pull for one client resulted in 1.7 million sites. Any Excel jockey knows there is a limit to 999,999 rows in Excel. Thus, the birth of the "long tail" in your DSP report.

Don't get me wrong. The long tail can be great. There are lots of little sites that attract genuine users and great impressions (albeit only a few impressions each month), but Excel, the most common user interface for DSP buyers, may be limiting your ability to maximize the value of the long tail. There are simply too many of these little sites to manage and optimize using Excel. And DSPs know this. So your DSP site report download limits your visibility into what specific sites in the tail perform -- or don't.

For example, as many as 50% of your programmatic buying might fall into the "tail" line item in a traditional DSP Excel report. Some of these sites are gold nuggets, others are dogs. Using Excel, you are not be able to determine which was which in the "tail" black hole -- and so can do nothing about it. No blacklisting, because you can’t see the sites to blacklist. No whitelisting, because you can’t see the sites to whitelist. No bid optimization because you can’t see the sites to adjust bid weightings.

Your hands are tied with Excel. You have to accept the tail for what is -- and therefore, its limitations. Only the top sites on the Excel sheet -- the ones you can actually see -- can be optimized. These are the "head": the sites you can see in a standard report.

Buying the Excel “tail” is still necessary for most brands, because eliminating it could result in a serious loss of volume for an overall campaign, yet you cannot predict exactly how much -- unless you can see into the black hole of the tail.

The only way out is applying data and transparency to the long tail to optimize, but to do this you need the right technical resources and infrastructure. This requires a core competency in data analytics from your agency, and a commitment to invest in the skills, processing hardware and software to enable ROI and client service at this level of detail.

Once you have visibility into the black hole, you may discover a disparity. For example, I recently saw a report for a new campaign where 5% of long-tail sites accounted for 95% of non-converting spend. This is no trivial matter for any advertiser, especially when for some campaigns the tail can exceed 1 million sites.

In this instance, we immediately blacklisted the non-performing sites. The result? Instant media cost savings and increased budget to reinvest in media that actually performs. 

Don’t be too hasty, though. Some pubs may need months before they hit critical mass. So it's not necessarily a black or white proposition. 

Still, this issue does underscore one clear lesson: Excel, and the lack of visibility therein, may be costing you money. If you want to maximize your programmatic media, it's time to get out of "Excel hell" and upgrade your data transparency and analytics.

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