NEW YORK, Sept. 10, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Index Exchange (IX), the world’s largest independent ad exchange, today announced an array of features delivering greater transaction visibility for all partners and bringing new levels of technical efficiency to the buy-side of programmatic advertising. The features are focused on delivering receipts for every transaction on the exchange and providing tools for optimizing supply traffic and buying efficiency for demand-side platforms (DSPs). These new features build upon the company’s leadership in identity solutions and header bidding innovations within the IX Library released earlier this year.
“Index's business is focused on helping publishers monetize their digital inventory, and that means ensuring our buy-side partners have the tools and access they need to bid effectively on our exchange,” said Michael McNeeley, Vice President, Product, Demand & UI. “This year, we’ve expanded our engineering and product resources for DSPs, agencies and advertisers to ensure we have the best demand possible for our publishers. We’re proud of the headway we’ve made so far and are excited for the additional buy-side innovations we have in our pipeline.”
IX’s new features that re-define the standards for visibility, auditability and efficiency include:
- Client Audit Log (CAL) Service – IX’s client audit log service is a free programmatic method of accessing log-level data for all events on the IX platform. This is important for auditing transactions and gives publishers, buyers, and data providers the ability to build more personalized insights or run sophisticated data science projects. By leading with a free product, IX has reduced costs for its partners and raised the bar for others in the industry.
- Sellers.json & SupplyChain – IX is one of the first major exchanges to implement the IAB Tech Lab’s specifications for sellers.json and the SupplyChain object. As a result, DSPs can understand each step in the supply chain a bid request takes in between a publisher and themselves, enabling DSPs to make better buying decisions for their clients.
- Intelligent QPS Management – DSPs are often constrained by how much exchange supply they can receive per second (QPS). They still seek ways to access as much relevant traffic as possible without overloading their systems. IX created two solutions to help our partners solve this problem. First, we introduced a new set of QPS limits either by a percentage or a fixed value of traffic, so DSPs can see a more consistent QPS stream from IX to better handle traffic spikes. Second, the IX Traffic Filter helps optimize inventory sent to DSPs by reducing bid requests that historically aren’t efficient for buyers, thus allowing supply that’s more likely to be monetized to use the DSPs’ valuable capacity. This delivers the most suitable and best performing traffic for buyers, while respecting the total QPS configurations of each DSP.
- Bid Translation – Bid Translation is a service to help DSPs and buyers transition to a 100% first-price auction environment by reducing the likelihood of overpayment on their bids. Based on auction competitiveness, price-to-win rate, and other auction signals, we estimate the value of an impression and will optionally reduce a buyer’s bid price if it’s determined they still have a high likelihood to win the impression at a lower rate. As a result, buyers who opt-into IX Bid Translation can obtain a fair price for the impression without having to change their bidding strategy based on auction type.
- Bid Compression and Auction Speed Improvements – To further reduce the data bandwidth costs required within the auction, IX implemented bid compression to reduce the size of our bid requests by 30-40%. IX also made various improvements to our auction code that have improved speed by almost 10%, allowing buyers more time to bid on impressions.
“Index Exchange continues to be a leader on major industry initiatives, shipping products that lead towards a more efficient and transparent ecosystem and being one of the first adopters of our Unified ID solution," said Tim Sims, SVP of Inventory Partnerships, The Trade Desk. “We're proud to partner with them on a number of tools and features that allow us to match more inventory and ultimately achieve better outcomes."
About Index Exchange
Index Exchange is a global advertising marketplace where premium digital media companies sell their ad impressions with accountability and in real-time. Built on the pillars of neutrality, openness, and the most reliable technology, Index is the ad exchange that media companies trust. With no other business interests to divide its attention, Index’s sole focus remains on connecting media companies with premium demand at massive scale. Visit Index Exchange at www.indexexchange.com or @indexexchange.
Alexandra Hewitt
Manager, Communications
Alexandra.hewitt@indexexchange.com