What is floor optimization?
Floor optimization is the sell-side practice of setting each impression's minimum price from data, moving Imp.bidfloor up or down by placement, buyer signals, time, or other context to earn more than one static floor would. SSPs, publisher ad servers, and header bidding wrappers all do it. Done well, it takes more from high-value impressions without killing fill on the rest.
Also called: dynamic floors, floor price optimization, yield optimization, price floor optimization.
How it works
Floors reach bidders through a few fields. Imp.bidfloor with Imp.bidfloorcur sets the open-auction minimum, Deal.bidfloor sets a per-deal floor that does not inherit the impression's currency, and video or audio impressions can carry DurFloors objects that price creatives by duration. A dynamic floor simply changes these values per request; OpenRTB says nothing about how the value was chosen.
The auction type changes what a floor does. In a second-price auction the floor mostly matters when only one bid clears, because it then sets the price the lone winner pays. In a first-price auction the winner pays its own bid anyway, so the floor works only as a minimum, and the gain comes from turning away bids that are too low.
The usual failures are mechanical. A floor in the wrong currency, because Imp.bidfloorcur was left out and defaulted to USD, rejects or underprices every bid. Floors set above the market clearing price cut fill and appear as loss reason 100 (Bid was Below Auction Floor), or 101 for deal floors. Prebid's Price Floors module and similar wrapper tools enforce floors too, so check that the wrapper floor and the SSP's own floor agree.
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Related terms
Every term is in the glossary.