How to build a programmatic inclusion list in 2023

This article intends to help buyers build a ‘bottom up’ approach to buying programmatic media. Programmatic media in, this instance, is any ad that can be bought through a demand side platform – according to the ANA this is estimated to be an $80bn+ industry in the US alone.

There are seven steps in this article:

0. Understanding trade offs

1. Building for geo-location

2. Set up to be responsible

3. Construct for quality

4. Design for sustainability

5. Test for performance

6. Final checklist

7. Ongoing maintenance

It’s widely known that an ‘exclusion list’ approach (buying ads on every site/app that is made available apart from the ones you choose to exclude) is poor practice because it doesn’t:

• Prevent ads running on low quality content (you are always reacting after the fact)

• Block ads running on Made For Advertising sites (as you aren’t excluding them from the outset)

• Reduce carbon emissions (as the paths to which you buy ads are broad and high in volume)

Good agencies and advertisers use an alternative ‘inclusion list’ approach, meaning that they only buy ads from sites that they have pre-vetted. This should be standard for buyers, but sadly it isn’t. This is corroborated via the ANA Programmatic Supply Chain study that showed some of the world’s largest advertisers on average ran ads on 44,000 sites and apps, and that 21% of these were classified as made-for-advertising websites that generated the majority of their ad impressions through paid for traffic (so that they could arbitrage the difference between cost of traffic vs revenue from ads sold).

“It is a great idea to move from block lists to inclusion lists. There are simply too many bad sites and apps to block.” - Dr Augustine Fou in August 2023

If you’re new to programmatic, or are currently being bamboozled by those around you, then this article aims to provide you with the steps required to build an inclusion list to avoid these issues. This can then be uploaded into your demand side platform (DSP).

Step 0 – Understanding trade offs using the PIQS framework

Image1 – PIQS framework for buying programmatic impressions

A good inclusion list balances four key pillars, with the best programmatic ad impressions intersecting all four. This is the PIQS framework for programmatic buying;

Performance

a. Your campaign does not suffer from applying an inclusion list that is too restrictive (i.e increased cost per reach, increased per cost per acquisition, reduced ROAS etc.)

Investment

a. Investing money responsibly ensuring you do not discriminate with whom you buy ads from (i.e balancing diverse owned media, running with positive publications, neutral politically etc.)

Quality

a. Your ads are placed on sites and apps which are of good quality (i.e good user experience, low number of ads on page, ads only load when in-view, value adding content etc.)

Sustainability

a. Run with publishers who are actively reducing their carbon footprint (i.e reduction in data calls, compressing file size of images, offsetting where applicable etc.)

It’s important to note that applying an inclusion list can impact performance of your campaigns, particularly in the immediate term. It makes sense, because buying an ad has a repeatable formula:

Cost of impression $ (* 1,000 as easier to manage) * expected conversion rate % = expected $ cost of goal

If you constrain where you serve ads, it is likely to increase costs (as you remove poor-quality sites/apps that are low cost), and, therefore, the campaign needs to have a higher conversion rate to counteract this.

The reality is, the campaign should have a higher conversion rate because you’re targeting real audiences, in environments where they’re likely to see the ads and be more responsive and act accordingly.

For reach-based advertisers this is a bit different, as you don’t care as much if a user goes on to do something directly, you care that they saw the ad, hopefully registered the content, and that you pay a low enough cost to do that. A conversion in this case might be an ad being seen for 5 seconds.

Step 1 - Building for your target geo-location

It is common for large agencies and advertisers to apply ‘global inclusion lists’. This is a list of sites/apps which are well known, likely predominantly English language only, .com only and with globally relevant content.

This is a good start, but there are excellent country specific sites/apps (using local domain extensions such as: .com.au in Australia, .nl in Netherlands or .com.jp in Japan for example) that buyers should focus on, because that’s where target audiences are consuming content.

You can find out which sites these are by using tools like SimilarWeb where you can see the top publishers in each country you want to run in.

The next thing to note is whether these sites are making ads available to your DSP of choice. One way to check this is to pull ‘impression availability reports’ (in most DSPs reporting sections) or reach out to your DSP sales rep. The reports will show something like (this is for UK per month);

Desktop

• yahoo.com - 2,821,566,042

• dailymail.co.uk - 2,717,411,064

• mail.yahoo.com - 2,288,435,709

• ebay.co.uk - 871,140,391

• theguardian.com - 717,590,645

Smart Phone

• thesun.co.uk - 4,815,798,686

• dailymail.co.uk - 3,117,160,692

• mirror.co.uk - 1,716,318,035

• investing.com - 1,611,498,246

• thescottishsun.co.uk - 748,393,212

It’s hard to say how many sites or apps should be on an inclusion list, but aiming to start with around 500 isn’t a bad rule of thumb per country you run programmatic ads in, with some featuring across multiple countries.

Step 2 - Set up to be responsible

One of the challenges when creating an inclusion list is that often buyers focus on the largest scale publishers (as this is the least effort for maximum volume of impressions to access), as opposed to focusing on the ownership of the publisher (often these are medium/small businesses).

When building out your inclusion list you can use tools such as WhoIs to understand site ownership. If this has been set to anonymous, then most sites/apps will have contact forms.

A good step is to add a column on your inclusion list which indicates the ownership of each publisher (gender, race, sexuality, nationality etc.), so that you can track this ongoingly.

Step 3 – Construct for quality

You want your ads to appear on sites that have a good user experience. Digital advertising only works if users engage with and/or recognize the brand/product/service etc.

Tools such as SEMRush looks at the quality of the publisher (especially traffic sources mix of organic/paid).

Building an inclusion list that classifies content at a page level is next to impossible, but you can classify the site/app using the IAB content taxonomy which is found at the IAB Tech Lab.

Dependent on an appetite to place ads against broad content (such as news), advertisers can use third parties to block ads serving against specific content (EG an airline not running ads on a news article about an air disaster).

Leading providers include;

• DoubleVerify

• Fou Analytics

• Human

• Integral Ad Science

All have different capabilities and are typically for enterprise advertisers (programmatic spend > $1m+ per year)

Step 4 – Design for sustainability

With increased awareness of climate change and governments incentivizing corporate behavior to reduce carbon (example) publishers which are reliant on advertising for revenue are working to reduce emissions.

In digital advertising, emissions are related to energy consumed per page load. Publishers’ pages often load with heavy content (large file sizes) and lots of pixels firing (essentially lots of energy used via data centers calling one another). According to AdTech firm Scope3, there are estimated to be 215,000 metric tonnes of carbon generated every month from programmatic ads in the UK, US, Germany, Australia and France, this is the equivalent to the total consumption of energy from 30,000 homes in a year.

Identifying carbon emissions per publisher is difficult as methodologies vary and creating your own carbon calculators can lead to false positives. Companies like Cedara and Scope3, as well as industry initiatives such as AdNet Zero can help identify publishers on an inclusion list that are carbon heavy and can be removed.

Step 5 – Test for performance

I mentioned at the start that applying an inclusion list to your campaigns out of the blue can have seemingly adverse effects on initial campaign performance. I’d argue that, if this happens, performance goals may be incorrect, but it’s naïve of me to think that campaign KPI’s can change overnight. The digital advertising budget holders within businesses need to see that their investments are returning positively.

Image 2 – example campaign performance graph that shows what can happen when an inclusion list is applied half way through a campaign

Step 6 - Final check list

Below is a summary list of the steps to make an inclusion list of investing in sites and apps that:

• Appreciate the trade off between Performance, Investment, Quality and Sustainability

• Are relevant for the countries you want to advertise in

• Which have diverse ownership

• That you deem to be of good quality content

• Are proactively reducing their carbon emissions

• Delivering effective campaigns

Step 7 – Ongoing maintenance

Creating an inclusion list of sites and apps is never finished as new ones appear all the time. The good thing about this approach is that you are always adding on to the list, as opposed to an exclusion list approach which can feel like a game of whack-a-mole that cannot be won. If you really don’t know where to start, then my friends at Lista offer a free inclusion list.

Continually staying on top of your approach, refining it where appropriate (EG using new data sources to verify) and adding new sites and apps will ensure you manage to find the ideal intersection of impressions within the PIQS (performance, investment, quality and sustainability) framework.

Assign multiple owners to the development and maintenance of your list, this might involve someone within the marketing team at the advertiser, an agency biddable media manager and a third party. Collaboration on the implementation of an inclusion list will ensure everyone is aligning behind the most appropriate incentives and learning continually. Ensure this list is centralized and the process for creation and upkeep is documented.

Final thoughts

You may have arrived at this point and felt like the above is nothing new, well, that’s because it isn’t. Oftentimes the simplest solution is the best one. Inclusion lists should be standard for all buyers, not ‘best practice’. However, no one company should own an inclusion list as it’s very dependent on the advertiser’s threshold for quality, commitment to investing responsibly and geographies they advertise in. The process may require some upfront time commitment and ongoing maintenance, but in the grand scheme of everything I have written about, this is minor compared to the upside it can generate.

Future posts and contact information

In future posts I’ll write about the more advanced ways advertisers can prevent themselves from poor placements as inclusion lists are only a start (and spoofing does happen on occasion), how to work with third-party providers for building on inclusion lists, how to use log files to verify what has been bought and how best to access the websites/apps on inclusion lists through different programmatic buy types.

If you have any comments or feedback please email wayne@wayneblodwell.com