What is mediation

Mediation is a strategy used by publishers (website and app owners) to maximize their ad revenue. They do this by integrating multiple ad networks into their platforms. A mediation platform serves as a central hub to manage these ad networks. In modern digital advertisement industry, such solution is mostly provided by SSP/mobile SDKs. As there are huge amount of advertising network out there ,it’s costly to integrate with most of them. As a mobile app owner, it’s seems impossible to integrate even with a small group of them. In such case, mediation emerged. Traditionally, every ad network offer the budget only to the apps. To maximize the income, some app owners with great development resources implemented their own ad network to diversify their budget source or they integrate multiple SDKs and applies a set of logic layers in app to choose the best bid. However, such not only increases the maintenance cost but also downgrades the user experience which is the nightmare of app owners. Networks started to support mediation since the issue turned out in the market. It was firstly implemented as server side function to distribute traffic to multiple bidders. To avoid performance issue and improve the unit price by narrowing the auction group of bidders, which was known as header bidding. Header bidding was known as a special solution for the client on PC webs. Nowadays, it’s been evolving. We can call it mediation or in-app auction.

How does mediation work

In terms of mediation, we should focus more on its business logic but not only on the technical features. The working model of mediation is quite simple. As an app developer, after integration with a mediation SDK , your app emits ad request via this SDK and it’ll distribute impressions to all the connected networks you specifiedd in the configuration with preconfigured logic. With mediation, developers can fence a group of bidders to have the auction on client side but not on server , which improved the performance and it’ll offers more flexibility to developers to monetize their traffic with dynamic strategies. There are basically two different selling models in the mediation mode, which are waterfall and auction. The waterfall model is to order bid in specific sequence according to contracts or some other agreement. The impression opportunity will be falling to lower priority advertisers if the price can’t meet the threshold of upper level. The open auction model is the simplest setting. Developer open the impression to all the authorized advertisers to bid and select the highest one to award the impression exposure. However, they are not exclusive to each other. Developers are free to adopt the hybrid model. Most of widely-used SDKs are supporting these selling models. Developers are able to segment bidders into different groups and set floor price to each of the group. Strategies are free to be tested with A/B testing to find out best combination of selling models.
The typical workflow of mediation is that firstly, you’ll need to configure the selling model and priority for the hybrid model. After SDK deployment , app emits impressions to SDK entry point. The SDK will request approved networks to bid on the impression. With the bids returned, SDK will follow the configured rules ,like floor price, selling priority, etc. to determin the final winner of the impression and serve creative onto the placement.

What should SSP and Pubs do to maximize income with mediation?

To use mediation, there are multiple benefits for the developers.

• Developers are able to select the bid with highest price.
• Developers are able to optimize the fill rate of placements by calling for more bidders from multiple networks.
• Developers are able to approach multiple networks with single integration with mediation platform.
• Developers are able to analyze data across different networks from consolidated measurement.

With various benefits , the developers/pubs should be cautious to work with mediation networks as well. First of all, since there’s only one single mediation platform approved to delegate the impression distribution, developers should choose most capable one according to the criterias below,

• The platform should be connecting to all the mainstream networks.
• The platform must be flexible enough to setting up selling rules in various combinations.
• The platform must be able to retrieve data from connected networks as many as possible and as detailed as possible.
• In the long run , the mediation service provider should be able to keep SDK up-to-date with the digital advertising industry. At the same time, developers may have to consider the integraiton cost as well. The major objects developers are the three below,
• To fill the ad placement as much as possible, which refers to the fill rate.
• To sell each single impression with as higher price as possible, which refers to the price
• Optimize the operation cost by consolidate data from different channels and optimizaing the selling strategy continously with handy toolkits. With all 3 above objects , it’s easy to evaluate the choice. As a mediation platform, the objectives are
• Obtain and reserve the right to distribute impressions of apps that the platform can sit on the top the impression distribution layers.
• Platform should monetize most of impressions , especially the premium impressions within its own networks that produce profits. It’s not the only purpose to serve the developers but also to make profit from each impressions locally within owned network. To meet the goals, platforms should collect budget as much as possible and the budget characterristic should be as diversified as possible. Hence, platforms should be able to guarantee the price and the fill rate. Besides, platforms should keep on improve its funcionality and toolkits to reduce the operation cost.

By reviewing all above, you can find the mediation platform and developers can fit each other’s objectives by doing their best in their own parts. They can be working like gears embedded into each other.

What’s more ?

Mediation , is a variant of traditional header bidding. As a developer ,it’s better to evaluate the candidate group of mediation platform and find one to adopt. Meanwhile, developers should be open for other options that your money stream won’t be controlled by others. As a platform , the services fee is not what you are always looking for. The ultimate purpose to provide mediation capability is to have the impressions monetized within owned network. In conclusion, mediation is an entrance but what important is to continously optimize the budget on owned network.