<b>Bid floors and the discovery game you're unknowingly playing</b>

<b>Bid floors and the discovery game you're unknowingly playing</b>

A bid floor (the minimum price an SSP will accept for an impression) looks static. In practice many SSPs run dynamic floors that adjust to your behavior, turning every bid into a probe.

The mechanism:
— A dynamic floor algorithm raises the floor on segments where buyers bid well above it, and lowers it where bids cluster near it.
— Its goal is to capture more of the gap between your bid and the floor as publisher revenue.
— Crucially, it learns from your bids. Consistently bidding 2x the floor teaches the algorithm that you value this inventory highly, and it ratchets the floor up toward your bid.

The game-theoretic consequence: under first-price, bidding far above the floor not only wastes money on that impression, it raises the floor you face on future ones. You are training your own cost up.

The counter-play, step by step:
— Identify floor-sensitive paths by watching whether your CPMs drift up after you increase bids, with no change in win-rate.
— Bid closer to the floor where you can still win, accepting a slightly lower win-rate for a lower learned floor.
— Use shading specifically to mask your true valuation from the floor-learning algorithm.

Why it matters: a dynamic floor is a second adversary in the auction, optimizing against you across time. Bidding as if the floor were fixed hands it the information to raise your prices.