As the ad tech industry evolves, both advertisers and publishers must continue searching for meaningful ways to improve the effectiveness of their digital ad campaigns. While new technological advances are continually explored, one thing is for sure: understanding the importance of win-fill rates in your programmatic advertising campaign is key to succeeding in today’s ad tech marketplace.
Fill Rate vs. Win-Fill Rate
Fill rate is an important measurement tool for general ad campaigns. Fill rate reflects the percentage of your ads that actually lead to an impression (and therefore get seen by potential sources of revenue). It’s calculated by dividing the number of impressions served by the total number of ad requests made, then multiplying by 100.
Alternatively, win-fill rate is used to measure the success of programmatic ad campaigns. In programmatic campaigns, ads are placed via an automated auction-based system that occurs in real-time. Win-fill rate reflects the percentage of bids won by an ad during this automated process, resulting in an impression. It’s calculated by dividing the number of bids won divided by the number of bids placed by the ad, multiplied by 100.
Both win-fill rate and fill rate are key metrics to understanding ad campaign success. Which one you measure depends on the type of campaign you’re running and whether it’s a metric provided by your ad server. Ad servers like SpringServe (a subsidiary of Magnite and partner of EuclidIQ), will measure win-fill rates of your programmatic ad campaigns to ensure you get the most out of your advertising budget.
Benefits of Measuring Win-Fill Rate
Nobody wants the resources spent on ad campaign creation to be wasted during the ad delivery process. Analyzing win-fill rate provides the clearest picture of your programmatic ad campaign’s success or, more importantly, failure. Noticing that your ads have low win-fill rates means you can make informed adjustments to improve that number until you’re confident in the campaign’s success. Those adjustments can’t be made without measuring the right metrics, which means that failing to track win-fill could result in loss of potential revenue brought in by your ads.
How to improve your win-fill rate
- Watch out for technical errors
Technical errors in your ads can lead to missed impressions and a lower win-fill rate. Consistently tracking analytics in ad campaigns can help you stay on top of technical errors and eradicate them before they become an even bigger problem.
- Match market demand
In order to get the most impressions and a higher win-fill rate, ads need to match the demand created by your target audience. This could mean adjusting your ad creative to better line up with customer demand, or partnering with ad publishers that are a better match for your product or brand.
- Address latency
A big factor influencing win-fill rates is the speed of ad delivery. Buffering or latency reduces the likelihood your ad will win the bidding process, resulting in a low win-fill rate. Partnering with a service provider like EuclidIQ, which optimizes ads for delivery without compromising quality, eliminates the occurrence of ad latency and results in higher win-fill rates.
EuclidIQ’s Recompressor, for example, shrinks the file size of pre-established video ads, which eradicates buffering or latency and results in a higher percentage of won bids. Additional features including audio normalization and heavy ad reduction reduce ad latency and increase win-fill rate for ads that may have otherwise been excluded from winning bids due to their content and formatting. Win-fill is a key metric to measure and analyze in programmatic ad campaigns to get the most out of your advertising budget. To capitalize on win-fill rate and increase revenue for your brand, reach out to hello@euclidiq.com to discuss how we can help.
