Karolina BendrykTraffic curation is all the buzz these days, promising DSPs and advertisers smarter targeting, cleaner supply paths, and better ROI. But it’s so difficult to define that even the term “curation” is not fixed and turns into “programmatic curation,” or “programmatic media curation,” or else, depending on the media source. So, we decided to fix it a bit by writing this article. It includes clear insights about why traffic curation is important and how exactly it helps demand-side platforms to optimize their ad budgets and audience reach.
About terminology
In general, curation is a strategy that provides more accurate targeting and higher-quality inventories for ad campaigns. It relies on various approaches, including supply path optimization (SPO) and curated deals. You can read more about it in this article. Here instead, let’s focus on the key point: curated deals.
They are not new. They are like dinosaurs in the programmatic world. The difference is curated deals are still alive (if you can say so). Originally, however, they offered only high-quality inventories. Now, they also include additional data like audience segmentation and users’ first-party data packaged by publishers or other verified curators into easy-to-use bundles.
This nice little change is what makes those modern curated deals so beneficial compared to alternatives like private marketplaces (PMPs) and open auctions. But there are other reasons for this, too
What are those reasons?
Effectiveness and higher level of transparency. The comparison list below makes it clear why.
PMP deals:
Offer inventories and their base metrics but without first-party data.
Requires buyers to involve themselves in negotiations with each seller directly to ensure that inventory suits their needs.
Can be dynamic, offering real-time auction-based pricing.
Curated deals:
Offer both inventory metrics and first-party data for each inventory. This data is segmented and categorized for specific advertising needs.
Have unique Deal IDs and can be managed through DSPs, eliminating the need for direct negotiations. However, such negotiations also have a place if you need them.
Can be dynamic. While also offering real-time auction-based pricing, curators may change the data included in the deal.
Open auctions:
Allow broad participation in buying and selling inventory but with fewer verification layers than PMPs or curated deals, leading to potential quality risks. PMP and curation instead rely on an invitation-only approach to ensure only partners with good reputation participate in deals.
Provide minimal data about inventories or supply chains, so it is hard to track where exactly ads appear.
To sum up, curation deals are like ready-made pizza from a supermarket: they provide you with a huge pull of valuable data that is already “cooked” (packaged) conveniently and ready to use.
PMP deals are like pizza you cook yourself: you have to find and evaluate each ingredient yourself to ensure it is fresh enough and suits your needs. Open auctions are also like pizza you have to cook yourself but without a recipe and with some ingredients missing.
How does traffic curation help to optimize ad budgets?
Curation is your tool to spend ad budget smarter. By “smarter” we mean gaining the following benefits:
Improved cost-efficiency. Like we said, curated deals provide traffic and inventories selected to cover specific ad needs, so their quality is higher compared to other sources of traffic. By buying such traffic, you spend your resources on relevant users, minimizing or even avoiding spending on waste inventories and an irrelevant audience.
Increased ROI. Each additional node in the supply chain increases costs for DSPs. To address this, curators often rely on SPO strategy to make their supply chains shorter and, therefore, more attractive to DSP algorithms. This, along with high-quality inventory usage, ensures that the ad budget is spent only on cost-effective pathways, improving engagement and conversion metrics and, thus, ROI.
Brand safety. Curators usually categorize inventories based on the type of content provided by the app or website they belong to. This helps to improve contextual targeting and maximize the possibility ads are served alongside relevant content, avoiding scandalous posts or other red flags for your brand.
A few tips for better results
While curation is all well and good, its dynamic nature may provoke risks. So, even when buying inventories from trusted curators, it is recommended to carefully check them.
First, try to check all offered data in a deal, asking directly what benefits you gain and how they can help with your campaign goals. If the offering sounds overly complex, be skeptical.
Also, some AI-driven tools significantly improve inventory evaluation and management. For example, Traffic Shaping filters and prioritises the most effective traffic, showing which one is converted into impressions and, respectively, improves ROI. It is equally helpful for analyzing inventories, simplifying traffic management, and protecting you from ineffective costs. Feel free to reach out to us if you need to discuss all the advantages of Traffic Shaping specifically for your business.
Curation and audience reach
It is no secret that third-party data eventually loses its effectiveness. This is not only because of privacy laws; users also do not want to share their data. While this trend shows some tendency to decrease, the number of those who prefer to keep their privacy is still high.
Percentage of people willing to share personal data before and after the ChatJPT era. Source: Jack Morton agency, 2024
This challenge can be addressed with first-party data from curated deals. It provides a variety of additional information that DSPs and advertisers can use to improve targeting. Depending on the publisher, it may include the following metrics:
Age
Gender
Location (city, region, country)
Website/App browsing history
Clicks and interactions
Time spent on page and so on.
By combining this data with their own, advertisers can target narrow and specific audiences, track their interests, and thus offer more personalized ad messages. This leads to increased audience reach, which may also help with so-called ad fatigue.
“Ad fatigue” describes situations when users see the same ads too often. This usually irritates them, leading to decreased CTRs and, thus, rising ad costs as advertisers must pay more and more to reach an acceptable number of conversions. In contrast, data from curated deals make it easier to find new groups of users who see the ads not so often or haven’t seen them at all.
You can also target inventories that meet specific technical requirements (for example, don’t refresh content too quickly or attract more users’ attention, making them click or interact with it often). And no need to mention that switching to first-party data usage helps to prepare more painlessly for a potential cookieless future.
Final thoughts
As tricky as it is, curation remains an effective tool, offering DSPs and advertisers more relevant traffic, cleaner data, better spend control, and higher-quality inventory.
But to get the most out of it, you’ll need tools like Traffic Shaping that provide maximum control over your traffic. An alternative option is to use more complex solutions, like our white-label SSP+Ad Exchange, offering much more additional functionality to improve traffic management and avoid ad frauds.
