WhizzCo has improved its process to continually optimize the performance of content recommendations.
On Wednesday, the company announced the changes, which are intended to provide more relevant and faster matches of ads to users based on the content.
The company could not quantify the increase in speed, but said that each time an ad is served, the technology more quickly analyzes the user’s geographic location, device, site, widget and layout and the recommendation for content.
The algorithm selects the network with the highest predicted CPM from among the content recommendation providers working with the publisher before serving the ad to the user based on real-time analysis, according to Yuval Nahum, vice president of product at WhizzCo.
“These are challenging times for publishers, he wrote in an email to Search & Performance Marketing Daily. “While there are more than 40 content recommendation vendors, they all won’t have the best or highest paying advertisers for publishers in every category all of the time. That’s kind of like expecting your local produce stand to have amazing avocados and strawberries for sale every single day.”
While all would love to receive the best produce daily, it is more likely that some days they won’t and the neighboring stand -- which may source from different places -- will, he wrote.
Optimization is not just about the highest CPM, but rather, serving the most appropriate ad.
WhizzCo is vendor-agnostic. The publisher can work with as many content-recommendation vendors as they choose such as Outbrain and similar companies to generate the highest ad revenue from among all possible ads.
Publishers either pay WhizzCo a percentage of revenue or a fee, regardless of the continuous optimization technology.
Content recommendation does not offer real-time programmatic bidding, like most forms of digital advertising. The ad serving is at the discretion of the content recommendation vendor.
When asked to cite the greatest challenge for the year, Nahum pointed to “educating the market about the negative impact of exclusive revenue-share agreements on their bottom line. When there are a few dominant market leaders with tremendous financial resources, it is a challenge to break through and show publishers that a vendor-agnostic offering is best for businesses and advertisers.”
WhizzCo plans to solve the challenge by proving the financial value of its offering — one publisher at a time — generating between 30% and 40% more revenue for each. Also, by demonstrating stable performance over time is possible because when one vendor suffers a lull, another vendor takes the lead.