Real Time Bidding with Commerce
What is Real-Time-Bidding with Commerce (CRTB)?
CRTB is a type of CPC monetization that a large portion of our merchants utilize to drive traffic to their sites. CRTB uses an auction from multiple partners of a given merchant to drive up your earnings-per-click (EPC) earnings.
How does CRTB work?
When CRTB is available for a given merchant, your audience may have their clicks routed through these programs. When a user clicks on your affiliate link, the click goes to an auction where multiple partners from a merchant will bid on the click, in which the highest EPC wins.
Not every click will win in an auction. If a merchant's partner deems the click not eligible for bidding, no bids could be placed. Bidding behavior is also dynamic on several different factors, such as brand spending, seasonality, or information collected on the user from the click. These clicks will not appear in your dashboard.
Why should I use CRTB?
There are tons of benefits to utilizing CRTB in your affiliate marketing integration. Some of the largest benefits our publishers see:
Competitive Rates - rather than traditional CPC methods where you earn a fixed rate, CRTB allows you to earn a dynamic EPC that can outperform traditional CPC models.
Higher Conversion Rates - CRTB allows you to earn on traffic you wouldn't otherwise earn on.
Access More Demand - many merchants utilize CRTB as their primary means of promotion. In addition, many merchants' only option for many non-content publishers to monetize their traffic is through CRTB.
How much can I expect to earn through CRTB?
Since CRTB is an auction-based pricing scheme, EPC can vary from click to click. Sovrn will send as much information about the click as possible to the merchant, but ultimately the final EPC is determined by the merchant.
The better quality traffic you send to the merchant, the more likely you are to earn on the traffic (and at a higher rate). In case you want to see a rough estimate of how a merchant has been performing across the Sovrn network, you can use the merchant card for more information. This rate is calculated by averaging the EPC across all publishers in our network on what they've been seeing in the last two weeks. Since this is an average, your rate may vary based on the traffic you sent towards the merchant or how the merchant's seasonality/budget looks.
What are some metrics I can use to track the performance of CRTB and how can I succeed using CRTB?
Your dashboard will be a great indicator of the success of your CRTB performance. You can see your CRTB performance by using your analytics. To see CPC by itself, click on the "Filters" button at the top of your analytics and make sure that CPC is the only selected filter under "Program type". Some of the metrics that you should keep your eye on:
Actions - an action is defined as any click that turns into a revenue event. For CRTB, since you earn revenue on the basis of a click, you will see roughly equal amounts of clicks and actions.
The closer your action to click ratio is, the higher your conversion rate is. This means that more of your clicks are converting into revenue events, so you're earning more of your traffic!
EPC - also known as your earnings-per-click, this indicates on average, how much revenue you're generating per click. We calculate this by taking your total revenue generated and dividing it by the number of clicks you've sent to Sovrn.
The higher your EPC, the more valued your traffic is for a given merchant program. In addition, the higher your EPC, the more revenue you are generating on average per click you send to Sovrn.
IMPORTANT: Your analytics will only show you affiliated clicks. This means that if your clicks had no bids, failed to go to auction, or were filtered out due to geography/promotional limitations, these will not appear on your dashboard. If you are not seeing a merchant appear on your analytics, this is likely due to a merchant not purchasing your traffic.
How do I enable/disable CRTB?
CRTB will be enabled automatically upon registration with Sovrn Commerce. If you ever wish to disable/re-enable your CRTB settings, you can adjust them using your Merchant Mix settings. CRTB is enabled in the Recommended settings but can be disabled by selecting the "Most Reliable" or "Traditional" merchant settings.
Will I see transaction/purchase information if a click goes through CRTB?
Since CRTB is a CPC-earnings based program, you will not see transaction or purchase information. This means that if a user purchases something after their click goes through auction, we will not track that purchase and you will not be able to see these appear in your dashboard.
Could I use fallback URLs or bid floors on my affiliate links?
You can! Bid floors and fallback URLs are parameters that you can append to your links to help optimize your revenue and connect Sovrn Commerce to your other affiliate marketing integrations.
Bid Floor - the minimum EPC in USD that you would like to earn from the auction
Fallback URL - the URL of the affiliate link where the click will route if the bid floor is not met in the auction
You can read more about how bid floors and fallback URLs function in this article.
To implement bid floors and fallback URLs, you can utilize them via the Create Links feature or via the API.
Create Links - under the "Advanced Settings" when creating or editing an existing link, you can place your bid floor (in USD) and your additional affiliate link.
API - in your link output, you can append the parameters by adding &bf= and &fbu= to the end alongside your values for each parameter.