Big Price Increase Ahead for Mobile Ads?

Goodway Group recently released its Second Annual Insider’s Guide to Programmatic Pricing.

The guide includes projections for programmatic pricing for the coming year, predicting a moderate price increase of 1-3% annually for desktop display media in 2018. Mobile advertising, however, will be the main driver of digital’s price hike, growing nearly 4% month-over-month with an expected overall price increase of over 45% by 2019. The mobile prediction includes display and video ads served on any mobile device, either in-app or in-browser.

“Mobile advertising has been historically undervalued because it has been siloed or considered secondary to desktop. However, with consumer behavior shifting to mobile and advertisers shifting to people-based marketing efforts, it’s no surprise that prices for mobile ads are going way up next year,” said Jay Friedman, COO, Goodway Group.

To inform the Guide’s predictions, Goodway Group’s data science team studied billions of bids placed and the average CPM price per week in the United States between January and September 2017. Using DSP raw impression files and classification to identify device types, the test included data from more than 10,000 campaigns, across every DMA in the country.

In addition to programmatic pricing, the report predicts several trends to dominate the marketplace, including a greater focus on optimizing campaign performance through audience, recency and site, a shift towards valuing impressions individually through machine learning, and the rise of combinatorial bidding.

“Machine learning has taken programmatic bidding to the next level, allowing marketers to determine the best value for each impression. Advanced algorithms can crack the infinite number of possibilities that exist in programmatic auctions today,” continued Friedman. “Looking ahead, the emergence of these trends and innovations will allow digital media to continue to evolve.”

To check out the report, click here.