Adsense vs AdX+Header Bidding

[robert976]

I'm using Adsense from 11 years. Everything has been fine until now.
I am seeing many agencies offering solutions based on header bidding (+ AdX).
I would like to know some real experience: gain increase is real? If yes, approximately how much does it increase in percentage?
Thanks
Robert

[keyplyr]

Hi robert976 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

[matbennett]

Hi Robert,

Our firm implements header bidding and exchange bidding with AdX for quite a few publisher, so I'll share my experiences (I don't try to plug what we do here so hopefully I can be reasonably impartial with it) . As with most things, there are not guarantees and mileage varies....

It's worth remembering that the process of implementing header bidding doesn't in-itself increase revenue. In fact, if you just installed prebid and stepped back the latency would likely cause a small drop. The principal of header bidding is to give a fair look at the request to more potential bidders. The gains come by having the right bidders in play. Example: We're currently taking over a site where they had prebid running with just one bidder who was only returning bids on 3-4% of ad-requests. Through careful partner selection we expect to see bids on the majority of impressions. In short, not all header-bidding set-ups are equal so it is hard to give a general result (and I'd be wary of those who throw around easy numbers).

Infuriatingly, results do also vary per site even with the same set-up. Even more so if you are looking for "gain vs adsense". AdSense will generally go well on very high CTR units due to the per click pricing. We certainly see units were we decide that the publisher will do better by ring-fencing those for AdSense.

"All very well, but give me a percentage" - yeah I know. OK, we work on revenue share so I'll talk only about net gains after revenue our revenue share. Worst I ever saw was 2%, partly due to the high adsense CTR issue we talked about: they just had units that AdSense loved. That's the only time I have seen it flop completely (we actually decided to do the right thing and drop rev share and recommend they they switched back to AdSense. 2% isn't enough to warrant switching provider so we wanted to make sure that they gained from the period they used us). At the other we've had a small number of publisher who have almost doubled their adrequest CPM (although that has been combining header bidding with exchange bidding, which we find is a particular useful approach). Unfortunately that isn't typical, but it hasn't been a one - off fluke either. Most pubs end up somewhere 30-50%, although we're often implementing other improvements at the same time so a like for like comparison isn't always that straight forward.

I was pretty skeptical about header bidding when it started gaining popularity. I witnessed some bad implementations in the early days and I don't mind admitting that I took some persuading. We live or die by the results that we get for client websites and now push for header bidding (or header + exchange) in almost every case. That shows that it definitely isn't all hype... although this industry does enjoy the hype!