Bid enrichment refers to the programmatic advertising technique, which enables enhancing traded media inventory with layered data signals, in order to make them more valuable for Demand-side partners’ bidding.
What is Bid Enrichment?
In plain words, bid enrichment implies supplementing the publisher viewers’/readers’ profiles with the other matched, anonymized (unauthenticated) audience data, to the bid requests in order to ensure more efficient targeting capabilities for bidding advertisers.
Even though the notion of bid enrichment is nothing new, its specifics have been undergoing transformations over the past years.
With the introduction of Seller-Defined Audiences, for instance, publishers have received an opportunity to enrich bid requests with their contextual and user SDA signals in a privacy-first, standardized manner, hence improving their inventory monetization capabilities.
More importantly, unlike in the past when it were DSPs and SSPs who handled the entire data enrichment process, in the past months some publishers have started to directly partner with bid enrichment providers/vendors in order to supplement their audience segments with extra data, which is then placed in the local storage on the publishers’ digital properties (typically in the array: publisherprovidedID) for the further bid request enrichment by SSPs.
Benefits vs. Challenges of Bid Enrichment
Quite predictably, the obvious benefits of bid enrichment include incremental inventory monetization opportunities for publishers, and the more effective audience targeting capabilities at scale for advertisers.
On the negative side, however, the process of bid enrichment may be associated with specific challenges:
- bid washing/audience data misrepresentation in the enriched bid requests with little to no extra verification options for advertisers;
- inefficient bid enrichment fee structure, where publishers may be subject to paying revenue share to third-party vendors for all enriched bid requests, without knowing if it were the enriched requests that made the most in terms of their advertising revenue.
Undoubtedly, the importance of bid enrichment in programmatic advertising will remain significant in the next few years, especially upon the deprecation of third-party cookies. However, the digital ad industry will need to invest into its mechanics improvement, in order to keep the process secure, yet scalable, and sufficiently lucrative for all parties involved.