What is Sellers.json and how can assist buyers with supply-path optimization?
What is Sellers.json and how can assist buyers with supply-path optimization?
Google released an initial version of its sellers.json file – a tool the AdTech industry is adopting to help buyers tell direct sellers apart from intermediaries – but it is largely incomplete.
Sellers.json is a transparency tool developed by IAB Tech LAB to help ad buyers distinguish between direct sellers versus intermediaries and resellers – and players who aren’t authorized to resell a publisher’s inventory.
Together with the IAB’s ads.txt and OpenRTB SupplyChain object specs, sellers.json gives buyers more transparency into the supply chain, disclosing all entities involved from the DSP to the end publisher – it’s like and ID card of all legal entities participating in the selling process.
Yet, only 5% of Google’s sellers.json files are complete, according to Jounce Media, even though it comes 7 months after competitors released their largely complete files.
Sellers.json can assist buyers with supply-path optimization (SPO), cutting questionable intermediaries to the most direct path for publisher inventory, but without Google’s file, SPO can be very challenging.
However, Google is prioritizing listing sellers.json files for intermediaries as buyers doing SPO care more about this data, because it helps them cut the low-value ones.
