As a Supply-Side Platform (SSP), your inventory is your bread and butter; and in order to offer buy-side businesses like advertisers and DSPs the best possible ROI for their ad spend, you need to build and maintain a robust inventory of high-value mobile apps and publishers.
While identifying new publishers to onboard is a great way to expand available ad space and provide advertisers with more customizable experiences, it’s also critical to properly manage your existing inventory. Indeed, if you neglect the apps and publishers you work with in favor of chasing new leads, you put your inventory at risk of quality erosion, which in turn leads to diminished advertiser trust and subpar revenue.
So, to help you avoid these pitfalls, this article provides three easy inventory grooming tips. In particular, we show you how to improve inventory quality by using 42matters to monitor app-ads.txt files, integrated SDKs, and more.
Here are three ways SSPs can protect revenue via inventory management:
- Don't Get Blacklisted by DSPs or Advertisers: Make sure publishers list your domain on their app-ads.txt files.
- Monitor SDK Uninstalls: Set daily inventory alerts to spot when publishers remove your SDK.
- Address Inventory Gaps: Maximize inventory value by making sure publishers add your SDK across all their apps.
Tip #1 → Don't Get Blacklisted by DSPs or Advertisers: Make sure publishers list your domain on their app-ads.txt files.
In the AdTech industry, app-ads.txt files function as certificates of trust. If a DSP reviews an app publisher that you claim is in your inventory only to find that they don’t list you among their trusted ad partners, there’s a good chance they’ll abstain from bidding on your inventory entirely.
Importantly, since many of the inventory validation techniques deployed by buy-side businesses are automated, buyers likely won’t think twice about freezing their bids on your platform. Indeed, they may not even realize they did so.
To steer clear of this, review every single one of your app-ads.txt listings. If a publisher hasn’t added your domain to their file, follow up with them immediately.
How to check app-ads.txt with the 42matters Explorer:
At 42matters, we offer a number of solutions for app-ads.txt. For example, many of the SSPs we work with automate the domain verification process with our app-ads.txt file dump, which provides comprehensive insight into all mobile and CTV apps available on 12 leading app stores. You can even speed things up by sending us a list of the mobile app publishers you work with. We’ll check them and notify you if any of them don’t currently list your domain in app-ads.txt.
To make the verification process more concrete, let’s look at how AdTech companies with relatively small inventories can use the 42matters Explorer to check their listings. The Explorer is a visual app market research platform that, among other things, lets you review app-ads.txt files and trusted ad partners for any iOS, Android, or Roku app. Here’s how it works:
First, launch the Explorer and navigate to the Android, iOS, or Roku dashboard, depending on which platform you’re interested in. Here’s what the Android dashboard looks like:
Next, find the relevant publisher in the Explorer. To do this, type the app’s name into the search bar on the left-hand side of the screen and click on the app to open its profile.
Once you open the app’s profile, navigate to the section titled Ad Sellers (highlighted above).
You’ll see all direct and reseller ad partners listed in the app’s app-ads.txt file. You can even click the link titled App-ads.txt: Show raw content to see the unvarnished listings:
Finally, by clicking on one of the resellers, like pubmatic.com:
You can see a list of all apps that list Pubmatic as a trusted ad partner:
You can even follow a similar process to uncover apps that use competitor SDKs!
BONUS TIP: Send us your inventory, and we’ll notify you if you're listed in all publisher app-ads.txt files!
Tip #2 → Monitor SDK Uninstalls: Set daily inventory alerts to spot when publishers remove your SDK.
A good way to monitor the quality of your inventory is to set automated alerts that inform you of changes to publisher SDK integrations and app-ads.txt files. This will help ensure the freshness of your inventory by enabling you to spot unexpected moves and follow up with publishers directly.
The 42matters Explorer and SDK Explorer are particularly helpful here. You can use them to send yourself daily recaps of changes to your inventory, including all SDK integrations and domain listings.
How to set SDK alerts with the SDK Explorer:
To provide an example, let's turn to another one of our visual app market research tools: the 42matters SDK Explorer. The SDK Explorer is a lot like the Explorer except that it provides intel on SDKs rather than apps. While we focus on the alerts feature below, you can also use it to track SDK integrations, SDK trends, and more.
In any case, to begin, launch the SDK Explorer and select the dashboard of interest. The options here are iOS, Android, and the combined iOS and Android dashboard.
Next, find your or your competitor’s SDK. In this case, let’s use the UXCam SDK as an example.
From here, click on either of the Alert buttons outlined above. These will navigate you to the Alerts module:
With this module, you can set daily, weekly, or monthly email alerts summarizing the latest SDK app integration changes. When you receive these updates, it’ll look something like this:
Want to get started with the 42matters app and SDK alerts? Chat with our team!
Tip #3 → Address Inventory Gaps: Maximize inventory value by making sure publishers add your SDK across all their apps.
The publishers you work with release apps across numerous mobile and CTV app stores. To get the most out of your inventory, ensure that your app-ads.txt lines are included across their entire portfolio of apps. This will help you bolster multi-platform campaigns and provide more value to advertisers.
How to address gaps in your inventory with 42matters:
One way to get started here is by using the 42matters App Bundle Verifier API. This tool uses app IDs to find matching apps across multiple mobile and CTV app stores, speeding up the process of checking publisher app-ads.txt files.
What’s more, we provide a file dump containing app-ads.txt details for all apps available on Google Play, the Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore, Tencent Appstore, Huawei AppGallery, Roku Channel Store, Apple TV tvOS App Store, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, LG Content Store, Samsung Smart TV Apps, and Vizio Smartcast.
You can combine these two solutions to address gaps in your inventory by doing the following:
- Use the App Bundle Verifier API to search your clients’ app IDs and view their app portfolios.
- Then, use the app-ads.txt file dump to access app-ads.txt files for each app.
- If you notice that your solution needs to be added to any relevant app-ads.txt files, reach out to the client and make sure they list you as a trusted ad partner.
To get started with the app-ads.txt file dump, reach out to our team!
