The beauty of the programmatic ecosystem is the interaction between supply and demand that creates constant opportunities for marketers and publishers to maximize their value in the market.
Similar to a quant in Wall Street, our Supply and Optimization teams are always analyzing what’s going on in the market. New publishers, price variations, ad whales, new campaign launches, and many more elements can bring opportunities or challenges.
When Coronavirus started spreading around the world and stay at home orders came to action in Europe. We started to see immediate impact in the programmatic supply market.
Rocio Montoya, Supply Manager and Gerard Colomer, Product Owner at Smadex, did a very insightful Q&A at the Entravision social networks. You can watch episode one here, and episode two here.
Some takeaways
- People got online during Stay-At-Home orders. We saw a huge jump of 35% of available in-app inventory in countries like Spain. Globally the spike was about 13%.
- Inventory from people using apps with Wifi, increased by 25%. That meant more opportunities to access audience with higher speed.
- Education apps inventory saw an increase of 126%.
- We saw a disparity between US and Europe in relation to the supply of business apps. In correlation with the different levels of stay-home policies defined both regions.
- It’s interesting to see that while we saw an increase of inventory, CPMs didn’t go down as expected. Showing that app marketers took the inventory left by brick-and-mortar brands.
When talking with app marketers we saw similar insights. Take a look at the latest Mobile Masterminds article: How Coronavirus Impacted App Marketing.
Due to all the big brands (mainly travel) pulling out, the CPM’s have been at an all time low since the start of the pandemic. This gave us more room to scale, which we did for all of our titles. However, since the last week of April we are slowly seeing our CPM’s increasing slightly, so this could be the sign of a brand entering the market again slowly as country restrictions are being eased.
Michael Jessen, Social Point
