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Rate Types

An overview of performance-based rate types and delivery-based rate types and the associated billing events aligned to these objectives.

Siva Balan avatar
Written by Siva Balan
Updated over 3 months ago

Here you have an overview of performance-based rate types and delivery-based rate types and the associated billing events aligned to these objectives.

Selecting a rate type influences the following aspects of delivery.

  • Forecasting

  • Serving / pacing

  • Reporting

  • Billing

  • Optimization

PERFORMANCE-BASED RATES

Performance-based rate aligns your pricing with the actual performance goal of a campaign, so you can give your clients better insight into campaign success and gain more access to client budgets.

Benefits

  • Access more buyer budget by aligning pricing with value (no more arguments about “waste”)

  • Align performance with rate to give you more leverage in price negotiations (“Sure, I can discount, but you will do worse in the auction.”)

  • Provide leverage to improve creatives (“Your creative is hurting performance, which hurts your ability to deliver, so work with me to improve it.”)

  • Use lower-viewability inventory more effectively (billing event is not tied to viewability)

  • Allow for more yield optimization opportunities by running non-reserved inventory (coming soon!)

Caveats

  • For reserved performance-based budgets, you may need a lot of inventory to deliver on action goals (e.g. clicks), resulting in a low average eCPM

  • For non-reserved performance-based budgets, you may struggle to deliver if the creative is poor or the price is too low

BILLING EVENTS
Performance-based rate types have billing events aligned to specific performance objectives, including clicks, video views, and engagements.

NAME

DESCRIPTION

EVENT

CPC

Cost per click

Click on ad unit for Native Display, Native Article

CPV

Cost per view

Scroll-to-play: 3-second video playback or interaction with video at any point
Click-to-play only: Video playback started

CPCV

Cost per completed view

30-second video playback or end of video or interaction with video at any point (scroll-to-play only)

CPE

Cost per engagement

15-seconds time on content (active tab) or other affirmative user actions, like:
- 50% scroll depth.
- CTA clicks, advertiser byline or logo clicks, and social shares.

OPTIMIZATION


Performance-based rate types have limited optimization options that are generally aligned with the formats they support. By default, these rate types should be optimized for the billing event, though downstream events are supported in some cases. We do not allow 'no optimization' (None option) as this would result in very poor utilization of inventory.

DELIVERY-BASED RATES

Delivery-based (also known as reservation-based) rate types are designed for campaigns that are sold with a delivery guarantee. Budgets using these rate types are allocated inventory based on their targeting criteria and performance objectives. In some cases, where inventory is very limited, performance objectives may be sacrificed to ensure full delivery of the budget.

📘

See the Optimizer section for more on this.

BILLING EVENTS
Delivery-based rate types have billing events aligned to delivery and the ad platform will prioritize delivery over any performance goals set on the budget.

NAME

DESCRIPTION

EVENT

CPM

Cost Per Mille
(1000 Impressions)

Standard Impression (ad is rendered on the page)

vCPM

Viewable Cost Per Mille
(1000 Viewable Impressions)

Viewable Impression (MRC standard)
ND, NA, NS, CTP Video: 50% of ad unit in view for 1 sec
STP Video: 50% of video player in view for 2 sec

70% vCPM

Cost Per Mille
(1000 Impressions with 70% viewability target)

Billing event is triggered dynamically to ensure that average viewability (MRC standard) is measured at 70%
STP Video not supported

Video CPM

Cost Per Mille
(1000 Video Starts)

Start of playback for STP Video

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