Ouest-France Doubles CPMs on Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) inventory With Xandr’s Prebid Server

06 janvier 2021
monetisation_Romain_Fevrier

“Xandr’s Prebid Server protocol allowed us to bypass AMP’s technical limitations and maximize the competition for our inventory. This empowered us to optimize CPMs and load times on our highly visible AMP inventory, two of our company’s most important goals.”

Romain Fevrier
Digital Monetization Director at Ouest-France Group

The Challenge

Ouest-France wanted to bring the benefits of header bidding to its AMP inventory

Ouest-France is one of the most popular regional news outlets in France, delivering quality news, sports, and opinion journalism to an audience of 500,000 print subscribers, 75 million monthly site visitors (June 2018 figures ACPM—OJD) and 2.5 million daily readers across mediums. Thanks to this audience, OuestFrance is by far the most-widely read French-language newspaper in the world. Last year, Ouest-France experienced the power of header bidding first-hand when it implemented prebid. js for its display inventory. By opening its programmatic inventory to its entire pool of demand partners, OuestFrance increased competition for its impressions and dramatically improved its CPMs. As the owner of a huge mobile advertising inventory, Ouest-France wanted to drive similar success for its smartphone and tablet inventory. However, nearly 21.5% of its mobile sessions were coming in the form of visits to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP optimizes and expedites the mobile user experience, but it does not accommodate the Javascript code necessary to run a client-side header bidding auction. In order to truly maximize its mobile performance, Ouest-France needed a technology partner that could help it circumnavigate AMP’s technical limitations. Only then could the publisher combine AMP’s fast load times and viewable ad inventory with header bidding’s high fill rates and CPMs.

The Solution

Ouest-France chooses Xandr’s Prebid Server on AMP Inventory

Ouest-France selected Xandr to implement Prebid Server on AMP inventory. Whereas a client-side header bidding implementation uses a browser to make calls to demand partners simultaneously, Ouest-France opted for a server-side header bidding implementation, which uses a Xandr server to handle auctioning and decisioning away from the page. By moving the header bidding auction to a remote Prebid Server, Xandr empowered Ouest-France’s demand partners to both compete for every impression on even footing and reduce latency by speeding up page load times. By doing so, Xandr enabled differentiated demand and scale to unlock the full value of Ouest France’s inventory.

As a result, Ouest-France increased competition for every one of its fast-loading, highly visible impressions, driving a rapid increase in its CPMs.

Best of all, Ouest-France was able to achieve this success without operational roadblocks. With the help of the world-class Xandr customer service team, the company enjoyed a painless implementation process that only took a month.

The Result

Ouest-France increases global publisher revenues and doubles its AMP Inventory CPMs

Prebid Server on AMP inventory transformed OuestFrance’s mobile monetization. By increasing competition with header bidding, Ouest-France was able to maximize the yields it earned from its AMP inventory. The firm’s server-side prebid implementation allowed it to double its average CPMs from $1.5 to $3 – without an increase in latency. Within three months of implementation, Prebid Server was responsible for nearly 20% of Ouest-France’s monetization of certain ad units. All of this made Ouest-France’s inventory more attractive to buyers, raising its global publisher revenues in the process