Levelling up display advertising with attention-based and value-based bidding

With third-party cookies soon to be a thing of the past, an extremely effective tool for targeting digital display ads will be removed from marketers’ toolbox.

With no behavioural targeting available, it will be imperative to optimise campaign performance in other ways. Two key options for display advertising are value-based bidding and attention-based bidding.

Value-based bidding

Value-based bidding makes use of first-party Floodlight activity data to bid more for impressions which are likely to lead to certain actions on the advertiser’s website. In this sense, it is similar to the ‘maximise conversions’ automated bidding strategy. However, value-based bidding goes beyond traditional automated bidding, as it allows the advertiser to assign variable values or ‘weights’ to different Floodlight activities.

This makes value-based bidding a particularly effective strategy for ecommerce advertisers, where purchases that generate greater revenue are assigned a correspondingly greater value by the Floodlight activity. The value-based bidding algorithm uses this Floodlight data to bid more for impressions that are more likely to lead to high-value purchases. Notably, this process is entirely based on first-party data and impression data, so will not be affected by the deprecation of third-party cookies.

However, ecommerce campaigns are not the only situations where value-based bidding can be useful. It can also be an effective method for improving the performance of campaigns focused on lead generation, or even website traffic.

For example, let’s say you’re an advertiser working on a tight daily budget, attempting to increase leads from very low volumes. In this circumstance, a simple ‘maximise conversions’ strategy is unlikely to have enough Floodlight data available to improve display performance. A value-based bidding strategy, on the other hand, can also optimise towards preceding steps in the user journey at lower values. This increases the total amount of Floodlight data available to the algorithm, making it useful even when actual conversion numbers are low.

For campaigns aimed at driving website traffic, max clicks and max conversions strategies can be used to increase traffic quantitively, but do not factor any qualitative data into the bid. Value-based bidding, meanwhile, can assign different values to different site visitors. Those who reach certain key pages, for example, can be given a higher value, while visitors who bounce can be given a minimal value. In this way, your display campaigns become more likely to result in site visitors who are genuinely interested in your product or service, and so more likely to return at a later date and convert.

Attention-based bidding

Attention-based bidding is like value-based bidding but instead of Floodlight data, the algorithm exclusively makes use of impression-level data to adjust bids. This means that attention-based bidding maximises the impact of display ads by focusing on factors like viewability and time-on-screen. While value-based bidding is a more efficient strategy for driving specific results on your website, attention-based bidding is the best strategy to increase brand awareness. An attention-based bidding strategy ensures your display campaign puts as many ads as possible in front of people’s eyeballs for as long as possible. This means that attention-based bidding is absolutely perfect if you are an advertiser in a crowded market looking to improve your share of voice.

Could value-based bidding and attention-based bidding replace third-party cookie data?

With third-party cookies being deprecated in the near future, value-based and attention-based bidding strategies are poised to become two important methods for optimising the performance of display campaigns. While audiences may well become less granular and targeted, these sophisticated bidding strategies can pick up some of the slack by optimising towards the kinds of impressions that drive the best results for your campaign.

The main downside of both attention-based bidding and value-based bidding is that, unlike automated bidding, both strategies require ongoing maintenance. The values or ‘weights’ given to the variables determining bids need to be reviewed and adjusted every few weeks to optimise performance.

Additionally, both strategies are technically complex to set up. Value-based bidding requires a sophisticated Floodlight tagging implementation, often involving an ecommerce setup in the GTM data layer. Attention-based bidding, while not requiring any GTM experience, currently requires some knowledge of the Python programming language to implement.

With that said, the advantages to value-based bidding and attention-based bidding are certainly worth the effort. If you’re interested in learning more about how value-based or attention-based bid strategies can boost your display campaigns, get in touch now to find out how equimedia’s programmatic solution Kaizen can help.