Archon CortexEvery bid matters.
Archon Cortex reads millions of rows of your real bid data — including the bids you lost — and sets the optimal price floor for every ad unit, country and device. Twice a week, every week. Publishers see 10–20% net uplift from floors alone.
Nobody can hand-tune a thousand floors.
Price-floor optimization is one of the biggest levers in ad yield — and one of the hardest to pull. With hundreds or thousands of ad units, dozens of geographies, shifting seasonality and an economy that moves under your feet, the "right" floor changes constantly. No team can re-tune them a hundred times a year by hand. So most publishers set a floor once and leave it — or hand the problem to a black box.
And the market now punishes idle floors harder than ever: in Q2 2026 open-web supply shrank while eCPMs rose — up ~30% year over year in the UK. Premium publishers are deliberately cutting low-value bid requests to protect price. That repricing only reaches publishers whose floors move with it.
Ozone data, reported by Digiday
We ran the experiments. Fixed floors won.
Our test-driven culture keeps producing the same result: data-driven fixed floors outperform Target CPM, Optimized CPM and set-and-forget strategies. The catch has always been maintenance — an optimal fixed floor doesn't stay optimal. Keeping thousands of them current is an industrial problem, not a spreadsheet problem. Cortex is the industrial solution.
Ranked by results across our floor experiments — relative order, not measured magnitudes; results vary by publisher.
The engine room.
Ingest the full auction record.
GAM Data Transfer files and BigQuery — won bids, lost bids, rejection reasons. Reports show you what sold; the landscape is in what didn't.
Reconstruct the demand curve.
Cortex fits yield curves per segment — the price-demand relationships that never appear in any GAM report.
Cluster the inventory.
Meaningful combinations across ad unit × country × operating system × browser × device category. Thousands of micro-markets, each priced on its own data.
Predict — then verify.
Every floor recommendation is backtested against your own history and validated against holdout controls, with seasonality deconfounded so a good week never masquerades as uplift.
Apply, twice a week.
New floors upload across the network every few days — no cap on ad units, no manual ceiling.
The evidence, not the slides.
The screens our analysts work in — one live ad unit, values as the engine computed them.
OS and browser values collapse to their families before tree splitting · segments too thin to price on their own data fall through to the ad-unit-wide default UPR · every rule ships with its auction count, combo coverage and measured uplift.
GAM experiments on publishers in our network.
of our floor experiments produced a measurable uplift
ad units tested, at three publishers in our network
range of the individual results
average net uplift from floors alone
The tests ran for a month, and the results showed within the first week. The spread is wide, which is why the test runs on your own ad units before anything else. We publish these results, so we keep the publishers’ names out of them. Their numbers are their business, as yours would be.
Two ways in. One month. One threshold.
The test at a glance
Pick your route. The diagram shows what moves where, and what you get back.
- Your Ad Manager 360
Data Transfer files
Every auction, lost bids included.
- loaded intoYour Google Cloud
BigQuery dataset
At least a week of rows.
- read-only accessCortex
Cortex platform
Reads it automatically. The data stays in BigQuery.
- new floorsYour Ad Manager 360
Your GAM experiment
Your split. Floors updated once or twice a week.
- the result, in your reportingThe gate
10–20% net
The test runs a month. Clear the threshold and you onboard.
- Your site
A few select ad units
Chosen with you.
- Manage InventoryAPH network
Our Ad Manager 360
The units serve through our network.
- bid data, automaticallyCortex
Cortex platform
Reads their bid data from our Data Transfer files.
- new floorsAPH network
Ad Manager experiment
We run it. Floors updated once or twice a week.
- Experiments results, shared with youThe gate
10–20% net
The test runs a month. Clear the threshold and you onboard.
Two ways to run Cortex.
Cortex as SaaS
The platform and training. Your team runs the floors. A one-year first term, then monthly with 30 days’ notice.
Join the APH network
All of our products and services. Our yield team runs the floors. Monthly, with 30 days’ notice.
Both shares are taken from gross ad revenue on the Cortex-managed units. No setup fee, and nothing owed before you onboard. Contracts are signed with Archon Programmatic House FZC, Dubai, a Google Certified Publishing Partner.
Before you ask.
Do you need Manage Account access or a login to our Ad Manager?
How much data does Cortex need?
Who can see our data?
Who measures the uplift?
What if the tested units gain less than the threshold?
Who signs the contract?
Find out what your lost bids are worth.
Tell us your domain and whether Data Transfer is on. A person on our yield team replies within one business day.
Request a Cortex test
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