As the number of screens and ad impressions continue to proliferate, advertising dollars are moving from traditional to digital environments with Forrester predicting that overall digital display advertising dollars will grow from an estimated $20 billion in 2015 to $38 billion by 2019. Publishers’ ability to leverage real-time data will be key to capturing their share of the digital ad spend. According to a commissioned study Real-Time Data Analytics: Empowering Publishers to Make Better, Faster Decisions, which was conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of PubMatic, 67% of publishers – large and small – believe that real-time data is important to their efforts, and 62% find that it leads to an increase in revenue, yet only 27% report receiving data in real-time.

Among the key findings from the research:

• Real-time data drives publisher growth.
• However, the vast majority of publishers do not receive their data in real time.
• As publishers grow, so, too, does their appetite for data and their need for analytics and insights that are actionable.
• Aggregating multiple data streams into one holistic view remains a challenge.

On behalf of PubMatic, Forrester conducted a survey of 110 media analytics professionals responsible for revenue management and decisions for analytics reporting tools. Sixty of the surveys were from US media and publishing companies, while 50 were from the UK. For the purposes of this paper, small publishers are defined as those with fewer than 500 employees, representing 43% of the respondent base, and large publishers are those with 500 or more employees, representing 57% of the total respondents.