The sales process presents supply-side platforms (SSPs) with numerous opportunities to fortify their revenue. Boiled down, these consist of onboarding more customers and limiting churn. However, accomplishing this is easier said than done, so we’ve outlined three ways SSPs can get started with revenue protection by using app intelligence to optimize various sales processes.

Here are tips for how your sales team can protect revenue by emphasizing process optimization:

1. Focus on Your Ideal Publisher Profiles (IPPs): Find best-fit apps to boost publisher acquisition.
2. Don’t Neglect Onboarding: Use app-ads.txt and other insights to ensure new clients add your lines.
3. Don’t Let Competitors Poach Your Inventory: Spot patterns in churn and address them head-on.

Tip #1 → Focus on Your Ideal Publisher Profiles (IPPs): Find best-fit apps to boost publisher acquisition.

One of the easiest ways to nip churn in the bud and secure revenue is to level up your publisher acquisition game. The goal is to build robust publisher inventories that serve highly relevant media and content to advertisers. If you can pull this off, you’ll be capable of delivering maximum ROI to bidders and publishers alike, relegating churn to the lower orders of your priority list.

To this end, for SSPs, lead generation and prospecting is essential. By zeroing in on your Ideal Publisher Profiles (IPPs) and tailoring your outreach efforts to app publishers that best suit your business, you’ll be able to boost conversions and create churn-proof inventories.

How to find apps that fit your IPPs with 42matters:

The best tool for zooming in on your IPPs and identifying best-fit publishers is the 42matters Explorer. It’s a web-based platform designed to simplify researching the mobile and CTV app market. Its user-friendly dashboard allows you to track app market trends and collect data on all published and unpublished apps available on Google Play, Apple App Store, and Roku Channel Store.

Here’s what the Explorer looks like when you open it:

You can browse millions of apps, games, and publishers, and access a variety of helpful insights and analytics to identify new leads and enrich existing prospect accounts.

The Explorer provides a ton of mobile and CTV app data including…

• Publisher Details: Names, contact details, country of origin, etc.
• Taxonomical Insights: Categories, genres, and IAB categories.
• Tech Stack Insights and Technical Specifications: SDKs, permissions, and required device capabilities.
• Localization Insights: Country availability and language options.
• Compliance Insights: App-ads.txt, age rating, privacy policy, advertising, sensitive permissions, etc.

These data points facilitate powerful filtering capabilities, making it possible to build highly granular lists for targeted sales, marketing, and advertising initiatives.

For example, if you’d like to find a list of apps that use a competitor SDK—let’s say PubMatic—you can use the SDK INTEGRATIONS filter to do just that:

Just select the filter, search for PubMatic’s SDK, and click APPLY. Here’s what you’ll get:

In this case, you can see all 1,453 Android apps that use the PubMatic SDK. If you’d like to dig a little deeper, you can see which of these apps list PubMatic in their app-ads.txt files:

To do this, select the AUTHORIZED AD SELLERS (APP-ADS.TXT) filter, search for the domain of interest, and click apply:

As you can see, 1,370 apps that use the PubMatic SDK list them as a trusted ad partner.

You can also filter by language options, country availability, category, IAB category, content ratings (i.e. audience suitability), and other metadata.

Once you’ve narrowed your list to the desired granularity, you can download the results into a CSV file and upload the leads to your CRM platform of choice. You can even save your queries on the Explorer dashboard to return to them in the future and see if key accounts have been updated or if new opportunities have emerged.

To learn more about generating high-value app publisher leads, set up a free demo!

Tip #2 → Don’t Neglect Onboarding: Use app-ads.txt and other insights to ensure new clients add your lines.

Once your team closes a deal, the onboarding process begins. It typically takes some time for publishers to get up and running since they need to manage the integration process internally, including getting acquainted with the features you offer and learning how to implement your technology into their workflow. So, perform regular status checks to ensure you’ve covered all your bases and things are progressing smoothly.

To do this, review the publisher’s tech stacks and check that they’ve integrated your SDK into their apps. Next, review their app-ads.txt files to see if they’ve listed your domain as a trusted advertising partner. This is particularly important since it tells advertisers you’re authorized to sell the publisher’s ad space, fostering trust and driving revenue. 

And remember, every day you spend onboarding a publisher is one more day of missed revenue!

How to track publisher onboarding with 42matters:

Once again, the Explorer is the best solution for this particular use case. So, to get started, launch the Explorer and select the platform of interest (Google Play, Apple App Store, or Roku Channel Store). Then use the DEVELOPER NAME filter to search for the relevant publisher:

Here are all apps published by Supercell, of Clash of Clans fame: 

Now, to review if they’ve integrated your SDK into their apps, you can open each app’s profile and navigate to the SDKs tab:

Here you can see all integrated and removed SDKs and filter them according to date of installation or removal. So, if your SDK doesn’t appear on this list, there’s a good chance it hasn’t been installed yet.

Next, you can skip over to the Ad Sellers section:

Please review which domains the publisher has listed on the app’s app-ads.txt file. As before, if your domain isn’t listed here, there’s a good chance the publisher hasn’t added it.

One last thing to note. You can also automate these checks using our app-ads.txt and Integrated SDKs APIs.

To learn more about tracking app-ads.txt files and SDK integrations, reach out to our team!

Tip #3 → Don’t Let Competitors Poach Your Inventory: Spot patterns in churn and address them head-on.

As noted elsewhere, your customer success managers (CSMs) play a vital role in revenue protection by supporting customers as they make the leap from prospect to installed base and fostering loyalty throughout the contract lifecycle. One of their responsibilities is spotting competitive threats and addressing them proactively.

With app intelligence solutions like the ones we offer at 42matters, your CSMs can see when accounts install competitor SDKs on their apps and add competitor domains to their app-ads.txt files. This helps them in several ways:

• First, it enables them to detect potential churn candidates before they remove your platform from their tech stacks or let their contracts expire.
• Second, it gives them insight into which competitors are having the most success poaching your customers.
• And third, it helps them uncover patterns and trends related to churn that can be used to develop retention strategies and make informed product decisions.

Indeed, using their knowledge of competitor solutions, your CSMs can review lost accounts and infer why they churned. While price, features, and ease of use are common reasons for publishers to migrate, looking at patterns among terminated clients, like common app categories, countries, and languages, is essential. This will make it easier for CSMs to hone their pitches and keep customers on contract.

How to spot competitive threats with 42matters:

This use case—using the Explorer to uncover competitive threats—is near-identical to the one explained above. However, rather than browsing apps that integrate your technology or list your domain on app-ads.txt, you should look for competitor listings instead.

Here’s an easy way to get started. Begin by launching the Explorer and opening the INTEGRATED SDKS filter. Then enter your and your competitor’s SDKs, select Have all, and apply the filter. Like so:

This will yield a list of all overlapping apps. In this case only one Android app (Logo Quiz PL) uses both OpenX and Pubmatic.

You can then save this query by clicking the Save Query button underneath the search bar. Once you do this, you can create an alert for the query by clicking the Add Alert button. This will notify you whenever there’s a change to your query. In other words, it will tell you when this particular competitor is threatening your installed base. You can learn how to set alerts here.

Want to learn more ways to protect your SSP’s revenue? Let’s chat :)