This week Infectious Media released their Insight Report on the state of the Real Time Bidding market in Europe and there was some interesting findings – especially arising from the more mature UK market. The report states that the RTB market in Europe is continuing to grow, currently the European RTB market tops 100bn impressions as a whole with 30bn of those coming from the UK market alone.
Google now predicts that within a mere 5 years as much as 50% of all online ad spend will go through RTB engines – and with these new figures released it’s hard to argue with them. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky state that going forward they will continue to embrace the RTB market at a quicker rate than even Google expects, predicting half of all inventory going through RTB in the next 2-3 years.
The report indicated that as a result of a more mature market, the UK is currently enjoying higher on average CPMs than their European counterparts – which has been great news for publishers in the UK. This has helped to allay initial fears that the RTB market would lead to overall lower yields for publishers, for the time being anyway.
More interesting insight from the report centred on the positioning of placements with the majority of categorised impressions appearing above the fold. Interestingly, the report also demonstrated that ads placed below the fold are on average currently commanding disproportionately high CPMs and CPC due to the introduction of more premium publishers entering the RTB market and a lack of information presented around placement.
The report detailed advertisers by category and it was clear that although the UK RTB market was more mature the spend by category did not fluctuate greatly across the continent, the only exceptions arose in the Telecoms, Media and Technology (TMT) and B2B sectors where there were slight, but not significant fluctuation in spend.
Massive price instability across the 5 month period in regards to CPM and CPC was also noted and not solely put down to changes in supply and demand. It’s evident from the research that many of the players in the RTB market are increasingly reliant on retargeting campaigns and as such there is more and more competition for certain key inventory. This trend was more pronounced in the UK and seemingly a consequence of a more mature RTB market.
All in all the report was a fantastic insight into the European RTB market but also a great indication into how a mature market works compared to a fledgling one. The UK is seeing CTRs steadily decrease as the market stabilise whereas Europe is the reverse as the market takes off. Common sense suggests that the European market will follow the UK and stabilise as the market grows and sometime in the near future they will be brought in line.
*All information derived from Infectious Media’s European RTB Autumn 2011 Insight Report based on 1285 campaigns from 34 countries across a 5 month period.