Direct Deal Sourcing With Property and Classifieds Portals

A homepage placement on a major property portal and an audience extension impression sold under that same portal's name are not the same product. In the deal terms we have reviewed, the second clears on the open web at roughly a third of the endemic rate while being invoiced within a few dollars of it. Knowing which line you are actually buying is most of this work, and it is decided in the deal setup, not in the reporting. How we source: We go to the publisher's own commercial team, not to a curation platform. In Australian property and classifieds that means REA Group, Domain, Allhomes, Nine, News Corp's property inventory, and for marketplaces the in-house teams at carsales, Seek and eBay Australia. Overseas we do the same with whichever three or four portals actually hold the category, which is rarely more than four. The conversation is about inventory the portal does not put into the open market: search results pages, saved search alerts, agent and seller profile units, and their own first-party intent segments applied to their own pages. Deal structures and when each is right: Programmatic guaranteed when the placement is scarce and dated, such as a homepage or a launch week. Preferred deal when you want a fixed price and first look without a volume commitment. Private auction only where there are at least three credible bidders for the same inventory and a floor we can defend. We will not set up a private auction with one seller and one buyer, which is a rate card with extra steps and worse reporting. What we negotiate besides price: The floor and its review date. Whether the deal ID carries the publisher's first-party segment or only their pages. Whether unspent commitment rolls or expires. Whether your creative can be excluded from their audience extension pool. Whether they will report delivery at placement level rather than site level. Price is the easiest of these to move and usually the least valuable. Deal hygiene after signature: Deal IDs fail quietly. We check delivery at day three and day seven against the SSP's own deal reporting as well as the DSP's, because a deal showing zero bids in the DSP and healthy bid requests in the SSP is a targeting mismatch on your side, and the reverse is a seller-side mapping error. Either is fixed in an afternoon in week one and costs a quarter if it is found in week ten. Our commercial position: We take no rebate, rev-share, referral fee or free inventory from any publisher, SSP or curator, and you see the deal terms as the publisher sent them. If we have worked for a publisher in the last two years we disclose it before taking the brief. This is also why we do not operate a curated marketplace or resell inventory, which is where most of the money in deal sourcing sits and where the conflict is impossible to explain away. Not included: We do not buy the media. We do not build creative to publisher specs, though we will tell you early when a spec is going to cost you a redesign. We do not handle the insertion order paperwork inside this engagement; that is separate work, and on a large commitment it is usually the piece that pays for itself. Who should not brief us: Buyers spending under roughly two hundred thousand US dollars a year in a single market. Portals will take the meeting and will not move on terms, and you will do better on their standard programmatic packages. Also anyone who wants a deal reopened mainly to prove their previous agency did badly. If the terms are poor we can see it in an hour, and there is no engagement in that.