At the latest AdMonsters Pop-Up Forum, a diverse panel (including publishers, tech, and media) was asked, “How is your user’s experience?” In the wake of GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act, redirects, and myriad malvertising issues, publishers are doing a pulse check on the user experience they deliver.

Our Publisher Business Development Manager, Ginny Hunter, was on hand to understand how publishers are shifting their media strategies and how this changes their data needs. Having worked with Edmunds in the past, we were very interested to hear how they’re navigating the programmatic landscape.

Jennifer Dodez, Executive Director of Ad Operations, Programmatic, Audience and Data at Edmunds, shared that the biggest culprit of a poor user experience was latency. Edmunds determined that this was largely due to loading heavy creatives from advertisers—a change was needed. They decided to switch their business model from impression-based to CPA-based back in July of this year to tackle the issues related to user experience and improve revenue optimization.

The change to CPA has had a number of benefits. It has helped strengthen communication and better align Edmunds with their advertisers—impression-based campaigns with heavy creatives were dropped in favor of lighter, faster creatives and moving people through the CPA funnel. This change has limited the total number of advertising partners Edmunds works with but has also strengthened the quality of the relationships they’ve maintained.

Premesh Purayil, CTO at Ranker, related to these latency issues with some creatives taking almost 15 seconds to load. He explained that they are starting to focus more on quality over quantity and after a few optimizations, they were able to reduce load time to just one or two seconds.

The event took place at Edmunds’ “EdQuarters” in Santa Monica, CA and was sponsored by GeoEdge. To learn more visit AdMonster’s event page. To see where we’ll be next, contact us.