The Urgent Warning Overheard at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit: Test or Face Failure

This article is part of a series covering our Programmatic Marketing Summit. More from the series →Despite the fact that marketers will (allegedly) come face-to-face with Google’s deadline for removing third-party cookies by the end of next year, having their post-cookie playbooks ready to go was not the only top-of-mind task amongst the attendees at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, which took place in New Orleans this week.During the town hall discussions, which are held under Chatham House Rules, meaning participants are granted anonymity to speak candidly, everything from Google allegedly invalidating traffic without explanation to how AI is being used to streamline more mundane tasks was discussed.Participants were asked ahead of the discussion to share some of the challenges they’re facing at work for Digiday’s challenge board, which was used to help spark conversation within the group. The bolded headers below are a few of the challenges shared by attendees and the quotes that follow are highlights from the resulting discussions. The quotes have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. From the challenge board: ‘Google deeming traffic from DSPs as invalid’ “We don’t really know what is happening when our ad servers are bringing back a good 20 [to] 30 [to] 40% of impressions, and even 90% of clicks, as invalid. We have a couple of… theories as to why. It’s usually around Google touching the media at some point to validate the different media that’s coming through, but in instances where it’s not touching it at some point, that’s really where we’re seeing the invalid go through. When that happens, though, we have trouble seeing what is actually valid versus what isn’t and it’s usually what Google’s seeing and their bias.”“It’s [happening at] different points of where Google can touch the media, whether it’s on the supply-side, the demand-side, the exchange itself; we don’t even get that level of granularity. And so those biases see if Google was touching the media, but like I said, it’s definitely just a guess on our behalf because all we can do is guess that Google is doing this as a self-serving type of ploy because they want to be able to touch more of the media and take more of the media dollars.”“We’re seeing it mostly with invalid clicks. That’s kind of the biggest problem. It happens with impressions too, but we have these great CTRs in the DSPs, and then we get the DCM report and it’s a really bad click-through rate.” [Editor’s note, basically the DSPs are saying the click-through rate is good, but the ad server is saying otherwise.]“Basically, we’ve just been building these really extensive blocklists to combat it and finding which sites that DCM seems to not like for some reason, which we can’t really figure out what it is, but they seem like good sites [but then the] clicks aren’t coming as valid but the traffic is. » … Read More