Publisher-oriented third-party vendors have one main task: to make their product work, in most cases by generating revenue for the publisher. If they can’t make that happen, they’ll tend to do the next best thing—i.e., try to make their product seem like it’s working.
Here’s the standard scenario: the publisher checks the numbers and everything looks solid. Fill rate? Decent. RPM? Stellar. But somehow, revenue still isn’t scaling. The money isn’t there. Why? Because by the time the dip starts, the publisher has already moved on to the next fire. And that’s exactly when small issues get overlooked—and vendors get away with more than they should.
This isn't malicious behavior on the vendor’s part. It happens in most organizations by default. Vendors fudge the numbers the way plants turn towards the sun, automatically and instinctively. But that doesn't mean publishers have to put up with it.
The right partner brings transparency. And the red flags that signal a bad one? They’re not hard to spot—if you’re paying attention.
Red Flag #1: You're Getting Reports, Not Results
Numbers can always be sliced and diced to tell—or sell—a desired story. But you, as the publisher, have the ability to distinguish real momentum from fake momentum.
Fake momentum is usually conveyed through vanity metrics—clickthrough rate and vRPM (viewable RPM), for instance, neither of which tell you much about your bottom line.
What you should be demanding, instead, are the kinds of concrete metrics that can actually speak to the success (or failure) of your partnership. These include:
- Viewability: Measures whether an ad had the opportunity to be seen by a user. This ensures advertisers only pay for impressions that had a fair chance of being noticed, rather than ads that loaded below the fold, were hidden in a background tab, or were skipped too quickly. Important note: media buyers typically evaluate viewability in aggregate at the site or campaign level, not per vendor. Translation? Your viewability stats may be high during your initial test with a vendor but if they start to slip 2 months later, your revenue will start to decline too. (Check out our industry guide, “The Science of Viewability and Beyond” here.
- Completion rate trends: The percentage of users who finish reading or engaging with a piece of content.
- Revenue per session: The average revenue generated from each user visit to a website, which can be segmented by various factors including device type, geographic location, etc.
- Bid density: The number of bids submitted for an individual ad impression in the course of a programmatic auction. Higher bid density can signify stronger demand and can correlate with higher CPMs, while lower bid density may suggest weak competition or inefficiencies in demand paths.
- Throttling rate - The percentage of ad opportunities (or bid requests) that are intentionally withheld or limited by a platform. A high throttling rate could mean you're limiting revenue potential by reducing the number of auctions demand partners can bid on. A low throttling rate might indicate that most inventory is being made available—but could also drive up infrastructure or processing costs.
Red Flag #2: “Your Fill Rate Is Fine—But Only Because You’re Underselling”
If a door-to-door knife salesman sells to 90%+ of the households he visits, we might be inclined to call him successful. But if we learn that he's selling his wares for 10 cents a piece—far below their market value—the story changes considerably.
The same applies in digital publishing. A high fill rate can only tell you a part of the story—and in many cases suggests that a vendor is filling at any price, instead of optimizing for value.
Quality and quantity should be the ideal when it comes to fill rate. This means that any vendor you partner with should offer:
- Dynamic floor pricing: The ability to set and adjust minimum acceptable bids for ad inventory in real-time, by triangulating factors like user behavior, device type, traffic source, historical demand patterns and more.
- Advanced bid segmentation: The ability to deploy distinct bidding strategies for different audience segments, allowing for more precise targeting.
You want to make sure your vendor is prioritizing high-quality demand—not simply taking all comers. EX.CO's AI-driven yield engine intelligently routes impressions to do precisely that—driving actual revenue, not just fill.
Red Flag #3: “They Say It’s Contextual—But It’s Really Just Guesswork”
When a video is well-matched to its accompanying article page, the odds of engagement increase drastically. This is the promise of contextuality. Many vendors, of course, are talking about it—but few are actually providing it.
It’s not uncommon, on certain websites, to see videos embedded on pages that are completely irrelevant (or worse) to their content. For instance: cat videos accompanying baseball game recaps. Or, worse yet: frivolous celebrity news accompanying articles about natural disasters.
This is the difference between "contextuality" as a gauzy marketing buzzword and actual contextuality, which demands true artificial intelligence. That means advanced, frame-by-frame video indexing and high-level semantic article analysis. These tools—provided by EX.CO—can drive 4X higher engagement rates with the video player than the industry benchmark.
Red Flag #4: “You Haven’t Seen an Update in Months”
There is a meme on social media: people who post about "big things coming" who never actually seem to do anything. This syndrome is very much on display among certain vendors, who might hint at exciting updates without ever delivering.
In some industries, slow-paced innovation might be acceptable. Digital publishing isn't one of them. This is an industry whose best practices can change completely in the space of six months. Vendors that aren't evolving are actively dragging you down.
Transparency is the only guarantee of success here. On a very simple level, your vendor should be able to tell you what they're working on, how that work is going, and when they plan to actually ship their next updates. You are, after all, partners. Your vendor should behave that way.
Bonus: 3 Questions to Ask in Your Next Tech Review
- “Can you show me how you optimize yield in real time?”
- “How does your contextual engine actually determine relevance?”
- “What ROI benchmarks should we expect in 30–60 days?”
TL;DR: If You’re Not Auditing, You’re Losing
When you sign on with a vendor, you are—in an ideal scenario—starting a relationship. As with any relationship, dialogue is crucial. Publishers shouldn't be shy about regularly checking in and asking hard questions. Spotty answers from a vendor here can tell you everything you need to know.
Again: few ad tech vendors are actively trying to deceive their partners. Trying to gussy up a bad set of stats is natural for any organization. But the net effect, of course, is the same: publishers get less for more. At a time of industry contraction, when every cent matters, that is not going to work.
Don’t settle for “fine.” Demand better.
EX.CO helps publishers uncover hidden revenue opportunities with transparent reporting, true contextual matching, and smarter yield optimization. Drop us a line below to start the conversation.