Ad Path Strategy: Why Shallow Paths + Key Values Win for Programmatic Revenue

The publisher community has been buzzing about ad path strategy this week, and for good reason. The Beeler.Tech Firehose In View Report revealed a fascinating split: while 67% of their Publisher Slack channel favor deep, detailed ad paths with minimal key values, only 12% of the Publisher Slack channel lean towards high level, shallow ad paths and leveraging more key values. Whereas, a whopping 60% of the broader Community Slack channel leans toward shallow ad paths leveraging more key values.

This divide isn't just academic, it directly impacts your programmatic revenue. And frankly, I think many publishers are making this harder than it needs to be.

The DSP Perspective: Complexity is the Enemy

Here's what many publishers miss: deeper ad paths make it exponentially harder for DSPs to understand your thousands of different endpoints.

Think about it from a demand-side platform's perspective. They're trying to optimize bids across millions of inventory opportunities. When you create elaborate ad unit hierarchies like /site/section/subsection/page-type/article-category/placement, you're essentially creating thousands of unique targeting endpoints that DSPs have to learn and optimize against individually.

The result? Fragmented bid optimization, slower learning algorithms, and ultimately lower CPMs for you.

Key Values: Your Secret Weapon for Granular Insights

This is where key values shine. Instead of baking every possible dimension into your ad unit path, you can:

• Keep ad units clean and hierarchical for basic organization
• Use key values to pass rich contextual data dynamically (learn more about first-party data implementation)
• Rely on placements in GAM insights to get granular reporting without the operational overhead

From what we know, key values offer crucial advantages:

• Dynamic toggling without slot rebuilds
• High targeting flexibility when combined with ad units
• Seamless pass-through to creatives and data 

The Revenue Impact

When DSPs can efficiently target your inventory using key values rather than trying to decode complex ad unit hierarchies, several things happen:

1. Faster Algorithm Learning: DSPs can quickly understand performance patterns across your key value combinations
2. Better Bid Optimization: Instead of treating /sports/football/nfl/gameday/sidebar as completely different from /sports/basketball/nba/gameday/sidebar, they can optimize on the contextual signals that actually matter
3. Increased Competition: More bidders can effectively compete when targeting is straightforward

Practical Implementation

Here's how to structure this effectively:

Ad Units: Keep them shallow and stable. Note that ad size is communicated in the bid request automatically, so you don't need to encode it in your ad unit path.

• /site/sports/
• /site/news/
• /site/lifestyle/

Key Values: Handle the granular context.

• sport = football, basketball, baseball
• content_type = game_recap, breaking_news, feature
• article_age = fresh, recent, archive
• user_segment = high_value, engaged, casual

Placements: Group related ad units for reporting without the complexity.

Monitor and Measure: Of course, it's important to monitor the effectiveness of whatever strategy you choose. 

• GAM: Here's where GAM's limitations become apparent. You can only report on one key value at a time, which severely limits your analysis capabilities. Hence the need for publishers to historically create complex ad unit paths to get the data they need. 
• Aditude Insights: Our publishers can solve this limitation through Insights, which lets you group up to 6 key values at a time, making granular data analysis possible without a massive ad ops task. You can slice and dice your performance data across multiple key value dimensions simultaneously without the operational overhead of managing thousands of individual ad units.

The Bottom Line

Yes, deep ad paths feel organized and give you detailed GAM reporting out of the box. But if your goal is maximizing programmatic revenue, you need to think like your buyers think.

Shallow paths with rich key value data create a more accessible, optimizable inventory structure that DSPs can work with effectively. You still get your granular insights through placements and key value reporting, but without creating an operational nightmare or hampering bid optimization.

The 60% of the Community Slack channel respondents who are choosing shallow paths + key values aren’t just following a trend—they're optimizing for what actually drives programmatic performance.

What's your experience been? Are you seeing better programmatic performance with one approach over the other? The data would suggest there's real revenue on the table for publishers willing to simplify their ad unit structure while enriching their key value strategy and other first party data passed into corresponding OpenRTB objects.