42 Percent Of Programmatic Buyers Still Get Reporting In Spreadsheet Attachments

While programmatic has brought automation to buying and selling of digital advertising, buyers say reporting from ad exchanges often isn’t keeping pace.

In a survey of major programmatic buyers and DSPs by Metamarkets, which provides analytics for programmatic advertising, 42 percent of respondents said they still get bid request data from ad exchanges through attached spreadsheets and more than half (52 percent) said it was too difficult to analyze the data for insights.

Source: MetaMarkets

The report notes that while there are ongoing discussions about a lack of transparency in the programmatic industry, getting clear, actionable visibility into the reporting when it is provided is a fundamental challenge.

Metamarkets suggests that this “visibility gap” is felt by the industry in throttled spends, lower auction competition, lower fill rates, and reduced revenue for publishers.

A COO at a major DSP responded in the survey, “One of the world’s largest exchanges provides a dated spreadsheet that does not have adequate information about pricing and scale. So to run on their platform, we have to take a ‘Fire-Ready-Aim’ approach.”

Metamarkets, of course, is aiming to fill the gap by having exchanges provide real-time data to its analytics platform.