A leader in custom bid price optimization tools, including Bid Modifiers and the industry’s only API for real-time bid price decisioning, Bidding Agent, Beeswax aims to help advertisers optimize campaigns wherever possible. While bid price optimization is a reliable way to drive campaign performance and fulfill objectives, it’s not the only solution. Budget allocation through delivery modifiers has become another key component of optimizing single campaigns individually and across customers’ entire portfolio.
What Are Delivery Modifiers?
Before diving into specific use-cases, let’s first get grounded on how budget allocation works on the platform. Beeswax launched Delivery Modifiers, a tool that allows buyers to express budget allocation weights against different sets of inventories (e.g. publishers, deals, geos). This feature is multivariate, meaning you can optimize against multiple dimensions (columns), with up to 100 rows total. Each row is referred to as a Modifier Term.
Budget weights are expressed as an integer, which is translated to a weight percentage. There is a Fallback Weight, which represents all other inventory available within a line item’s targeting. Beeswax will independently pace against each individual Modifier Term, reallocating budget between terms every hour to ensure delivery in full. There is an additional value for a % cap, that allows a buyer to cap specific inventory sets versus expressing specific weights.
The fundamental value of this feature is it mitigates against volume bias. Instead of buying more of what is plentiful by default, you can instruct the DSP to buy more of what you want while ensuring delivery in full.
How Delivery Modifiers Are Used
Now that you have a basic understanding of Delivery Modifiers, let’s talk about some use cases.
1. Prioritizing Deals over Open Market
As a CTV buyer you may try to prioritize deals with major TV networks (e.g., NBCU & Paramount), then allocate budget to multi-publisher deals, and then fall back into the open market to ensure full delivery. The setup below shows an example of how this can be expressed as Delivery Modifier Terms. The Fallback Weight of 5% will ensure that the line item can deliver if there is not enough inventory for the 3 Modifier Terms above.
2. Limiting Volume Bias Geographically
Let’s say you run a fast-food business with brick-and-mortar locations in three Metros/DMAs: New York, Boston, and Macon, GA. If you’re targeting all three in a line item, you would likely deliver more to New York by default given the population size, but perhaps you have more locations in Boston and want to allocate more budget to that DMA without creating a separate line item with discreet budget. Delivery modifiers provide you with a simple way to accomplish this. In the example below, we’ve weighted Boston at 60%, and included a % cap on New York to ensure we don’t overdeliver in that DMA. In this case there is no fallback as these are the three DMAs targeted on the line item.
3. Prioritizing “Owned & Operated” While Falling Back to Off-Network
If you’re a publisher utilizing Beeswax to buy your own supply and/or run audience extension, you may want to prioritize your supply, and only consider off-network buys when you can’t fulfill the campaign. This provides additional control over costs and ad frequency, versus managing campaigns in two separate systems. In the setup below, the system will try to deliver 99% of the budget to O&O, but if there isn’t enough available it will shift more to open market.
Discover How Delivery Modifiers Can Work for You
Budget allocation is a valuable way to manage different business rules or hit performance targets regardless of your objective. It limits trafficking requirements for trading teams, allowing them to focus on data analysis and optimization instead of campaign duplication and updating numerous line items.
If you want to talk more about how Delivery Modifiers can fit your specific use cases, reach out to your customer success manager or drop us a line at info@beeswax.com.
