Ramping Up Viewability & RPMs with Trader Interactive

About Trader Interactive

Trader Interactive is an online marketplace that connects buyers, sellers, and renters in the powersports, recreational vehicle, aircraft, marine, commercial vehicle, and heavy equipment industries through a broad portfolio of brands. 

Collectively, their marketplaces reach over 13 million monthly unique visitors. Founded in the US, their ad operations team looks after 13 brands.

The Challenge

Publift partnered with Trader Interactive with the goal of delivering strong business outcomes across both programmatic and direct revenue streams. Trader already had a strong ad operations team and ad setup with Header Bidding, Open Bidding, an Amazon integration, as well as good ad density. 
However, the team wanted an upgrade in these areas:

• Swift A/B testing and launching new ideas and optimisations, so they could easily drive advertising performance.
• Building confidence among internal stakeholders to spearhead large-scale changes. Having worked with other enterprise publishers, we understand the complexities of aligning media strategies with the goals of product and development teams.
• Equipping themselves with a platform that empowers the ad operations team to modify display inventory without the need for extensive developer support.

The Approach

Trader’s team worked with Publift’s integrated customer success manager to implement optimisations that would improve these metrics:

• Page RPM
• Average eCPM
• Total revenue
• Average viewability without any negative impact to the traffic of the site. 

With our enterprise dashboard, Trader could benefit from our A/B testing tool, Fuse’s ad injection capabilities, implementing easily modifiable ad sizes and breakpoints.

Ad Injection

The key driver to this strategy was through strategic ad unit placements using Fuse’s ad injection through the enterprise platform combined with Publift’s technical expertise. 

Gallery Unit

‍
Trader injected a single 300x250px unit appearing between slides in gallery, when the user is viewing photos of the vehicle. 

Keeping user experience in mind, we incorporated a promotional thumbnail and set the banner to come up only after 3 photos –  this ensured the user was well informed of the upcoming ad unit and could easily skip the ad through to the following slide.

The results of this optimisation was impressive with the CTR achieving over 1.8% and an eCPM over $4. The gallery unit comfortably became the highest earning unit amongst all others. 

In Content Units

Multiple in content units were injected onto the listing page, one of the highest visited pages for Trader.  These units were placed between a predefined number of listings on the page such that no two in content units would appear on a screen at once.

Custom Banner Ad Unit for Direct

With our enterprise platform, Trader was able to launch new custom direct creative templates in minutes. Work that would usually take months to test and build was executed in hours. We implemented temporary sponsorship units, custom creatives and products through Fuse.

“TI is impressed with the ability to make changes to our display inventory without the need for a large team of developers. For example, we are able to inject new ad zones without hardcoding the tags on site.  This allows for some custom products for niche-advertisers.”
- Paul Cook, Senior Product Manager, Trader Interactive

Yield Optimisation

Merely adding ad units and changing layouts isn't sufficient to boost revenue, especially when considering factors like traffic preservation, maintaining inventory quality, and stakeholder expectations. 

A focus area was improving total average eCPM, which involved evaluating bidding processes, trends, and advertiser analysis. Our supply side platforms (SSPs) analysis led to the removal of low-yielding partners, resulting in positive shifts in advertiser buying behavior.

In addition to that, our ad-block recovery solution helped tap in an additional 10% of revenue from users with an active ad-blocker on desktop. 

Implementing floor pricing algorithms that analyse and enhance bids in real time contributed to further improvements in the value of the available programmatic inventory. 

A/B Testing

Publift collaborated with Trader Interactive in biweekly Yield sprints to enhance viewability and CTR without affecting current revenue streams. This was done through controlled low-scale A/B tests and monitoring key performance metrics. 

Aiming for a viewability threshold of 70%, we utilized Fuse’s lazy-loading (lazy-loading allows the delay of rendering an ad on a webpage until an user reaches a certain point on the page), strategically placing load buffers to analyse their impact on revenue, impressions, eCPM, and viewability.

The Results 

Since going live with Publift, Trader Interactive’s programmatic page RPM went up by 88%. The average revenue per day for FY 2023-24 increased by 66% YoY. ‍

In the early stage of onboarding, the average viewability of Trader’s site went up by 62%! This was achieved due improvement of our tag load speed and batch-loading and lazy loading optimisations based on the user behaviour.  

‍Publift was able to help TI rapidly increase the value of our digital display inventory by implementing the Fuse tags. This allowed our ad ops team to manage the method in which we deliver our inventory on our pages.  We implemented lazy load to increase viewability which resulted in over-night increase of 85-100% in viewability.  

Once Fuse was implemented on all core TI marketplaces, we were able to increase GAM ad units’ viewability to 70% by the end of Q3 2024.

“Publift is a technology but also a partner in our success.  It is valuable to have experts in display advertising work directly with TI to accomplish our mutual goals.”

Are you an enterprise publisher seeking a solution that will get your optimisations live faster, drive ad revenue performance, and instill confidence in your stakeholders? Reach out to Publift to learn about how our enterprise solutions can achieve your goals today.