Overview
How can programmatic advertising help marketers reach relevant audiences without sacrificing scale?Many campaigns face a familiar trade-off: broad targeting can dilute performance, while narrow segments can limit reach.
A major Japanese retailer ran into this challenge while testing different targeting parameters. When targeting was too broad, performance across key metrics stalled. When it was too narrow, scale dropped sharply.
To move beyond this trade-off, the retailer partnered with Index Exchange and Intimate Merger—a leading Japanese data marketing platform—to evaluate whether activating Intimate Merger’s audience data through sell-side decisioning could improve both efficiency and outcomes.
Solution
Index Marketplaces was built to enable marketers to drive better outcomes by applying intelligence on the sell side. By bringing Intimate Merger’s audience data to the supply layer, Index Exchange could filter and prioritise requests before they reached the DSP—so only high-quality impressions were delivered.
Rather than relying solely on DSP targeting logic, Intimate Merger applied audience insights earlier in the process, at the request level. This enabled more accurate pre-bid filtering, reduced irrelevant bid requests, and helped improve match rates. As a result, the DSP gained access to more qualified inventory and high-value outcomes.
Results
By activating Intimate Merger’s data segments through Index Exchange’s sell-side decisioning, the campaign delivered improvements across scale, cost efficiency, and engagement:
- 391％ increase in impressions, despite a 99.7% decrease in bid requests
- 20% reduction in CPM
- 50% improvement in CPC
- 620％ increase in clicks
Sell-side targeting outperformed DSP-only targeting across major KPIs, demonstrating the impact of shifting more decisioning into the supply layer. With a larger set of high-quality opportunities, the DSP could bid more strategically and deliver stronger results for the advertiser.
“Our partnership with Index Exchange demonstrates a new set of possibilities for data activation in programmatic advertising. By applying our data at the pre-bid, sell-side stage, the DSP was able to minimise inefficient bidding while maximising reach to users who truly deliver value.
Traditionally, scale and acquisition efficiency have been seen as a trade-off. This approach breaks through that limitation, delivering significant improvements on both fronts.
As the industry continues to move away from reliance on third-party cookies, we strongly believe that activating audience intelligence on the supply side represents the next-generation solution for maximising advertiser ROI.”
— Ryota Sato, Post-Cookie Group Manager, Data Business Division
Intimate Merger
Discover how Index Marketplaces and sell-side decisioning can boost performance
