The publishers shaping their traffic are earning more from the same impressions. Are you?
In programmatic advertising, more bid requests don’t always mean more revenue; they just create congestion. The bidstream carries requests from SSPs to DSPs during a real-time bidding auction, but a single impression can trigger many unnecessary requests, leading to bidstream bloat.
This bloat is growing fast. Between 2020 and 2023, bid requests surged 2.3x, while programmatic ad spend grew only 18%. For publishers, it reflects that more impressions don’t equal more revenue unless they match real demand.
Now let’s break down what causes bidstream bloat, how traffic shaping helps control it, and practical ways to streamline your ad performance.
Key Takeaways
- Bidstream Bloat happens when excessive, redundant, or low-value bid requests flood the programmatic ecosystem and create inefficiency.
- Between 2020 and 2023, the number of bid requests grew 2.3 times, but ad spend increased by only 18%. This shows that more traffic doesn’t always mean more revenue.
- Around 41% of all bid requests are repeated or rebroadcast, while only 59% come directly from the original supply.
- Traffic Shaping is the process of organizing and prioritizing ad requests to ensure the right impressions reach the right buyers efficiently.
- Bid Throttling is the process of controlling and limiting bid requests sent to DSPs to reduce congestion and improve auction efficiency.
- Future trends will reflect the use of AI and machine learning to automatically spot and block duplicate or low-quality traffic in real time.
What is Bidstream Bloat Exactly?
DSPs process nearly 30 million bid requests per second, and as the adtech industry continues to grow, publishers will keep on competing to ensure the right buyers see their inventory. A single publisher may be connected to the same SSP through multiple exchanges, unintentionally generating duplicate bid requests for the same ad impression.
These repeated requests do not add value; they simply flood the bidstream, making it harder for DSPs to identify quality inventory. Therefore, Bidstream bloat is when too many unnecessary or duplicate bid requests flood the programmatic process, especially DSPs, slowing down the further process and reducing efficiency.
What’s Fueling Bidstream Bloat?
Bidstream bloat doesn’t happen overnight; it’s the result of faulty automation processes across the ad supply chain. Let’s check out some key contributors that cause bidstrem bloating:
- Traffic Overload: Because DSPs can process only a imited number of requests, traffic overload leads to inefficiencies and unnecessary compute waste.
- Mirror Impressions: Crowding of bids makes it difficult for DSPs to distinguish valuable impressions from repeated ones, ultimately lowering the quality of available inventory.
- Clashing Interests: SSPs push out as many bid requests as possible. This volume-driven approach contrasts with the publisher’s need to maintain efficiency across both high- and mid-value inventory.
- Supply Surplus: The rise of new formats such as Connected TV (CTV) and changing user behaviour has created a surplus of impressions with limited demand.
How Bidstream Bloat Impacts Ad Performance?
The consequences of bidstream bloat go far beyond operational inconvenience and directly impact performance, profitability, and sustainability.
- DSPs spend a good amount of resources filtering redundant traffic, increasing cloud costs, and operational overhead.
- Excess bid volume delays auction responses, leading to slower page loads and reduced user experience.
- Valuable impressions often get buried under redundant bid requests, reducing competition.
- High-value inventory remains overexposed while the rest struggle for monetization.
- High-quality ad spaces get shown too many times, while the others don’t get enough chances to earn revenue, impacting the overall ad performance.
What’s Traffic Shaping?
Traffic shaping is like giving your ad inventory a quality check before sending it into the programmatic marketplace. It’s the process of controlling and optimising which ad requests get forwarded to SSPs, DSPs, and other demand partners, ensuring that only high-value, relevant impressions enter the auction.
In simpler terms, traffic shaping helps publishers prevent flooding DSPs with duplicate or low-quality bid requests, and it allows you to send only the ones most likely to attract high-quality bids. By doing this, all demand partners can enjoy cleaner traffic, better performance, and improved efficiency.
How Traffic Shaping Works?
Traffic shaping works by analyzing, filtering, and prioritizing ad requests based on ad performance data and audience signals. Here’s how it looks in practice:
1. Filtering Out Irrelevant Traffic
Using advanced algorithms, traffic shaping filters out bid requests for quality, removing duplicate, redundant, or low-value bids before they ever reach the auction. This prevents DSP overload and ensures only meaningful impressions are considered.
2. Prioritizing Premium Impressions
Using rules like domain, placement ID, floor price, and device type, traffic shaping ensures first priority to your most valuable impressions. Especially when DSPs impose limits on how many queries per second (QPS) they can handle.
3. Dynamic Optimisation
Modern systems use machine learning to continuously adjust filtering rules in real-time. This allows publishers to react quickly to changes in demand, ad performance, and user behaviour, all while keeping high-quality inventory.
4. Smart Bid Throttling
In the past, SSPs and DSPs controlled bid throttling by deciding who got access to which impressions. But, with traffic shaping, you can choose impressions you want to send, which partners need to be prioritized, and when to remove underperforming SSPs.
5. Smarter Auctions, Better Revenue
By sending fewer but higher-quality requests, publishers can increase competition for valuable inventory, leading to higher CPMs, faster auctions, and better buyer trust. Your ad space becomes more desirable and not just another bid in the flood.
3 Traffic Shaping Challenges to Watch Out For
While traffic shaping can transform how publishers manage their programmatic demand, it also comes with its own operational and technical complexities. To discover its full value, publishers must strike the right balance between precision, performance, and partnership.
Over vs. Under Filtering
Over-filtering can de-value demand by blocking high-quality impressions, it reduces auction volume and potential revenue.
Under-filtering, on the other hand, fails to solve bidstream bloat, leaving DSPs flooded with redundant requests and slowing down auction efficiency.
Technical Integration and Latency
Flawless integration is critical for traffic shaping to function without disrupting ad delivery.
- Platform Compatibility: Tools must work smoothly with existing ad servers like Google Ad Manager 360 or Prebid setups to maintain consistency across channels.
- Low Latency: By leveraging automation, real-time decisioning, and server-side integrations, you can maintain the speed and reliability of bids.
Continuous Optimisation
Traffic shaping is not a one-time fix. Suppose you’ll review your performance metrics, such as QPS utilization and bid response times. Second, you can adjust parameters as user behaviour, formats, and SSP performance evolve. Finally, you can sync with SSPs, DSPs, and tech partners to anticipate ecosystem changes like new query limits or auction rules.
Solutions and Best Practices
Bidstream bloat may seem unavoidable, but the right traffic-shaping strategies can help every player in the ecosystem reclaim efficiency, reduce waste, and improve performance.
DSPs: Reward Efficiency, Not Volume
Demand-side platforms need to work on how efficiently their supply partners deliver traffic. To make it better, you can:
- Measure and Compare: Analyze your inbound traffic-to-bid response ratio to identify which SSPs are sending high-quality, relevant signals, and which are flooding you with noise.
- Optimize Spend Pathways: Spend on partners who maximize your queries per second (QPS) allocation with meaningful, high-performing supply.
- Encourage Transparency: Set clear expectations with SSPs about bidstream optimization standards and reward those who consistently send cleaner, more targeted traffic your way.
Doing so not only reduces processing costs but also enhances campaign delivery without sacrificing performance.
SSPs and Publishers: Take Control of Shaping
The passive supply is over. SSPs and publishers must now act as active shapers of their own traffic. For better traffic, you should:
- Invest in Smarter Tools: Implement or partner with traffic-shaping solutions that use machine learning to identify and move forward only for high-value impressions.
- Test Constantly: To track how bidstream compression affects fill rates, you should make adjustments that maintain both efficiency and profitability.
- Collaborate Closely with Demand Partners: You align optimization strategies with DSP feedback to ensure the filtering process enhances value rather than creating latency or disconnects.
By doing this, you can turn your inventory into premium, high-performing real estate that attracts better bids and higher CPMs.
Advertisers: Demand Smarter
Advertisers also have a role in cleaning up the bidstream bloat. Let’s look at some ways advertisers can help in traffic shaping:
- Include Traffic Shaping in Vendor Evaluation: When assessing SSPs or DSPs, consider their ability to manage bidstream efficiency as part of your ESG and sustainability goals.
- Push for Responsible Innovation: Support partners that demonstrate measurable reductions in unnecessary data transmission.
Auction Duplication vs Bidstream Duplication
Two major culprits behind this bidstream bloat and unnecessary data are auction duplication and bidstream duplication. While they sound similar, they operate differently and together, they’re responsible for much of the inefficiency causing the bidstream congestion.
Auction Duplication: The Re-Auction Effect
Auction duplication happens when publishers send the same ad impression through multiple SSPs to increase their visibility and chances of being bid on by DSPs.
However, this approach creates a ripple effect of redundant auctions across exchanges. Each SSP effectively re-auctions the same impression. This leads to multiple the number of bid requests flooding DSPs. Research suggests that an average impression can appear up to 30 times across the programmatic supply chain due to these re-auction cycles.
Bidstream Duplication: The Data Problem
Bidstream duplication, on the other hand, is a broader term. It indicates the multiple replication of bid requests sent across multiple channels, often carrying the same or overlapping impression data. Unlike auction duplication, which happens intentionally to increase visibility, bidstream duplication can occur unintentionally through technical overlaps, multiple integrations, and poorly optimized supply chains.
What’s Next?
The future of traffic shaping is moving beyond basic filtering. As programmatic advertising continues to grow, the upcoming trends will help publishers, SSPs, and DSPs to create a cleaner, more efficient bidstream.
AI-Driven Optimisation
Machine learning impacts how traffic shaping works. Future systems will automatically learn from bid patterns, user engagement, and campaign outcomes.
Smart Real-Time Analytics
With faster and real-time analytics, traffic shaping will become proactive rather than reactive. Platforms will instantly detect bidstream data, duplicate traffic, or low-value impressions, ensuring DSPs only receive real bid requests.
Targeted Inventory Intelligence
Publishers’ responsibility goes beyond selling premium inventory. The often-overlooked placements that can drive meaningful revenue when surfaced strategically through smarter traffic control.
Frequently Asked Questions
Bidstream data is the information shared during a programmatic auction, including user, device, location, and inventory details. For publishers, it matters because it influences bid value, demand quality, and monetization. Clean, accurate bidstream data helps attract higher bids, reduce waste, and improve overall revenue performance.
Bidstream bloat can be reduced by eliminating duplicate bid requests, limiting multi-SSP routing, using frequency caps, and prioritizing high-quality inventory. Publishers should work with SSPs that follow strict traffic filtering and transparency standards. Smart supply path optimization and better ad-server configurations help streamline auctions and reduce unnecessary bid volume.
Bid throttling is the process of limiting the number of bid requests sent to DSPs to control traffic load and reduce unnecessary auction pressure. It helps manage system resources, prevent latency, and prioritize high-value impressions. Throttling ensures cleaner auctions, improves efficiency, and reduces costs for both publishers and DSPs.
