How to increase revenue with SmartFloor: Conversation with Lillia Matsokha from TeqBlaze

Some monetization businesses advocate for using a lower bid floor as a “fewer risks” approach. Others maintain their current bid floor setup for months, if not years, due to a lack of resources. Both of these approaches are red flags for your revenue. Why?

We explored this and more with Lillia Matsokha, VP of the Client Service Team at TeqBlaze. She shares her thoughts on key bid floor issues that traffic monetization businesses face and how TeqBlaze helps address them.

Karolina: Why is it so challenging to set up bid floors?

Lillia: For publishers, the main challenge is the dynamic nature of programmatic advertising. It requires constant monitoring of the market to understand trends, comparing them to internal metrics, and attempting to determine the optimal bid floor. It is hard work that requires time and effort, but even then, it doesn’t guarantee a mistake-proof result, which is also a problem.

And what about the supply-side perspective?

Intermediaries, such as SSPs and Ad Exchanges, confront a different set of challenges. Their core objective is to maximize publisher revenue from inventory sales. This requires compelling DSPs to submit higher bids for the offered inventory, and here, problems emerge.

An SSP’s/ad exchange’s performance directly depends on the bid floor set by the publisher. If the publisher sets this floor price incorrectly, it becomes more complicated or even impossible for the supply partner to sell inventory. Typically, a bid floor that is too high results in a low fill rate, while a bid floor that is too low poses risks of revenue loss. However, SSPs and ad exchanges can also make mistakes, such as setting a single bid floor for all types of traffic, regardless of its quality.  

Can publishers and supply partners handle those issues when setting up bid floors manually?

No. Humans can’t monitor market trends and metrics nonstop. Nor can they quickly analyze massive volumes of data. Without this, setting the bid floor correctly is almost impossible. Yes, “almost” impossible. A small SSP with a few connected publishers might handle manual setup, but what if you have fifty or more publishers? That’s a tricky, unsustainable task. For this reason, companies often use static bid floors. These remain unchanged for weeks or even months—a direct path to under-monetization. Why? A static bid floor overlooks market fluctuations, so it can be too high or too low in most cases, resulting in lost revenue. For the supply side, this is especially critical as they may lose new clients and partners. Just think: which publisher or intermediary will partner with an SSP that provides them with lower revenue compared to others? That is a problem—and a risk—that every traffic monetization company should deal with.

How can companies mitigate the problems mentioned?

By using dynamic price models. TeqBlaze offers its own solution—SmartFloor. It is designed to avoid unjustifiably low bid floors. Instead, it helps determine the optimal price for each auction by analyzing multiple factors in real time.

Is it a separate service that can be installed on any platform?

SmartFloor is a part of the Smart Bidding Pack that comes with TeqBlaze’s white-label SSP+ad exchange platform. It relies on machine learning technologies to track and evaluate massive datasets, dynamically optimizing bid floors and eliminating manual work. A user only needs to set an initial bid floor value and start bidding. Should key performance indicators—such as revenue yield or win rate—drop, SmartFloor meticulously analyzes auction dynamics to identify the cause. If a low bid floor is causing the issue, the system will adjust it accordingly. This, in turn, motivates DSPs to respond with higher bids as well.

What other competitive advantages does SmartFloor offer? 

SmartFloor is a competitive advantage itself. It helps maximize publishers’ revenue, which, in turn, motivates them to stick with their SSPs and ad exchanges. In other words, tools like SmartFloor help the supply side attract more publishers. And it’s not just them: DSPs are far more likely to partner with effective SSPs, too. If, for example, an SSP/ ad exchange can’t deliver a stable win rate, a DSP stops buying from them. SmartFloor addresses the issue by offering optimal pricing for inventories. 

Additionally, Smartfloor allows smaller businesses, which may not have large AdOps teams, to operate more efficiently, while larger organizations can reallocate their teams’ efforts to more strategic tasks.

Do you have any interesting practical cases regarding SmartFloor that you’d like to share with us?

Sure. We have clients who use SmartFloor constantly and experience revenue growth as a result. One notable example involved a client who was facing a high rate of lost bids in publisher-side auctions. Their primary issue was an excessively low bid floor, set at just $0.34. Consequently, their win rate in these crucial auctions hovered around 24.02%.

After SmartFloor intervened and adjusted their bid floor upwards to $0.42, the picture changed: the client’s win rate climbed to 29.03%. In total, revenue increased from $377 to $419. Like they say, feel the difference. Another essential fact: without SmartFloor’s intervention, it might take significantly more time to determine the reason for lost bids and fix the issue.

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Setting up a bid floor manually is, plainly, a pain. But that’s only the case if you’re stuck doing it manually. Using machine learning algorithms like SmartFloor is an entirely different story. As you’ve seen, it isn’t just minor upgrades; it's a necessity that enables your business to operate more efficiently.

At TeqBlaze, we specialize in offering solutions exactly like SmartFloor. Each is designed to solve a specific, complex task, but their collective goal remains consistent: to boost your effectiveness, increase your revenue, and simplify your daily operations.

Interested in learning more? Let’s talk.