BidSwitch True Price

True Price is a technology developed by BidSwitch to optimise the bidding strategy of a Buyer, and it is most effective when bidding at a Supplier using a first-price auction or a modified second-price auction. The technology uses machine learning to identify the optimal bid price for a given Bid Request.

Buyers that enable True Price on their account will still conduct their bidding in the usual manner through BidSwitch, except that True Price will adjust the bid price of 90% of their traffic, with 10% of traffic going untreated as a control group to test its effectiveness.

Prerequisites

To access True Price you need to sign a contract addendum allowing BidSwitch to change your bid price. To discuss the contract addendum details, contact your Client Services representative. Once signed, it can be enabled on your account.

Note

As it is enabled per connected Supplier, Buyers require a Minimum Trading Volume of 50,000 impressions per days with that Supplier over the previous 3 days of trading. This is due to the volume needed for the machine learning algorithms to work effectively.

Enabling True Price

Once the above pre-requisites are met, you can enable True Price on a per Supplier basis from the True Price column on the Active Supply Partners page. Select Supply Partner ‣ Active ‣ Start True Price. There is a number of controls/phases to go through before True Price becomes fully operational:

  • Waiting to Start - Once enabled, True Price waits until midnight (UTC) to start working. The current midnight restriction is due to reporting

  • Learning - In this phase True Price learns the best bidding strategy for this Supplier auction

  • Stopped - If you stop True Price it cannot be restarted until midnight. Note: You may stop True Price at any time.

  • True Price has not been started for this partner - You have never used it when trading with this Supplier

Trading Impact

  • eCPM trading values will drop as you are lowering your Bid Price

  • You may see a drop in your win rate, but the maximum win rate drop is 5%. In the majority of test cases True Price has only had a negligible effect on win rates

Validating this Impact

You can check these figures in the True Price Report, which you can download from the myBidSwitch UI using the Reporting ‣ Media Report ‣ True Price Performance button. You can also see the nett savings figures in the True Price Savings column of your Media Report

Reporting Methodology

To measure the effectiveness of True Price, it is calculated in the following manner:

  • 90% of Yes Bids are modified by True Price and 10% are left untreated as a control group

  • To get the figures for how your integration with the Supplier is performing with True Price enabled, the modified and unmodified figures are calculated as if to represent 100% each, giving you a side-by-side comparison:

    • Untreated Traffic Figures * 10 = total untreated traffic estimate

    • True Price Figures * 1.1111111 = total treated traffic estimate

  • The difference between these figures represents the effectiveness of True Price, whether it be for total savings, eCPM, or win rates.

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Protocol Control

In addition to relying on BidSwitch to measure the effectiveness of True Price, you can also run your own untreated traffic through BidSwitch using the true_price_opt_out field. See the Bid Response Ext Object section for details.