• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, August 22, 2016

Ad-tech firm AppNexus on Monday announced the launch of two tools it calls Advanced Deal Metrics and Bid Error Report. Both will enable publishers and advertisers to identify and address deficiencies associated with their deals and real-time bidding (RTB) strategies.

The new capabilities are designed to enable all stakeholders in the ad-tech ecosystem to reduce friction associated with programmatic buying and selling, cut time spent troubleshooting and access revenue lost on rejected bids.

With the launch, AppNexus hopes to enable buyers and sellers to communicate more effectively with one another.

“We know that transparency, on both sides of the marketplace, is key to driving revenue for publishers and increasing ROI for advertisers,” Pat McCarthy, SVP product, AppNexus Publisher Technology Group, told Real-Time Daily via email. “By providing granular bid-level data to our clients, data that black-box solutions choose not to share, we’re enabling buyers and sellers to more seamlessly transact directly with each other, streamlining digital advertising’s complex supply chain.”

Troubleshooting programmatic campaigns is often a complex and ambiguous process, resulting in missed advertising opportunities and lost revenue. A

ppNexus said that most solutions to this problem have focused either on publishers or advertisers, but not both together. The result has been incomplete data capture and information-sharing.

With Advanced Deal Metrics, AppNexus said it added new data points to each stage of the deal process, from bid request and bid rate to invalid bids. For example, AppNexus said its platform now flags 30 distinct reasons for bid rejections, offering publishers and advertisers more specific insights into individual deals throughout the impression flow.

With the platform’s filtering capabilities, publishers and advertisers can narrow fields to quickly identify potential error types and change their settings to overcome roadblocks and align with bid requirements. Data streams in 10-minute rolling windows, so users can refresh their results and see campaign adjustments take effect in near real-time.

AppNexus said its Deal Metrics tool has helped improve the deal strategy for Gourmet Ads, an online platform for targeting grocery buyers. By using the tool, “we were quickly able to drop our average daily-deals-related error count by 30%, which resulted in a daily revenue uplift of $1,000,” stated Benjamin Christie, founder and president at Gourmet Ads.

AppNexus said it is also alpha testing Bid Error Report for sellers, which flags bid errors across open auctions in RTB.

The Bid Error Report allows buyers and sellers to understand how their deal settings, such as ad quality and yield management -- along with more than 70 reasons for bid error -- are impacting their auctions.