In a survey of more than 600 buy and sell side professionals Technorati found that almost half of publishers (45.45 %) say they are frustrated by not being able to have demand partners compete with each other on each impression. As a result they are forced to use tactics they don’t peculiarly like to try and maximize yield.

Almost half of those surveyed (49 %) say they use passbacks and floor prices to maximize yield of programmatic demand solutions, essentially “daisy-chaining” or waterfalling, the practice of giving each partner in a series a chance at an impression before moving it along to the next partner if it is not purchased.  About the same percentage manually adjust ad serving rules based on estimated CPMs and fill and/or work with fixed-CPM partners.

Those surveyed identified the following as their biggest challenges when working with programmatic demand solutions:

• Not being able to have demand partners compete with each other on each impression (45.45%).
• Daisy Chaining or Waterfalling partners is inefficient and not as effective as I’d like it to be (43.43%).
• Not having my own internal developers with time/resources/ expertise to support my needs (44.44%).
• Not having the technology and tools that address my needs (43.43%).

Technorati also found that while the majority (64.71%) of publishers and buyers use just 1 to 5 programmatic partners, a significant segment of both groups use more than 6 programmatic partners (29% for buyers and 27% for sellers).

The majority of buyers (66.47) said that they buy ad inventory through private marketplaces. Publishers surveyed believe that inventory discovery, deal negotiation and inventory packaging all need to be improved in private marketplaces.