# Payout Bid Modification: A New Way to Increase Profit as a Network

## Why this matters

We build for every part of this market — publishers, networks, and buyers alike. Publishers already have powerful tools for their side of the trade: Route by Bid and Route by Performance let them choose, dynamically, every second, the best buyer for their traffic based on what's happening in the market right now.

Networks deserve the same kind of tool for the other side of that trade. Route by Performance and Payout Bid Modification are two sides of the same coin: Route by Performance is the publisher dynamically picking the best buyer; PBM is the network dynamically picking the best payout for its traffic — sometimes higher, sometimes lower — without a human needing to sit in the loop running the mechanics or building something complex. A human's job is just to decide whether to turn it on.

And the two are directly connected: if your payouts are too low, a publisher on Route by Performance will notice and quietly send their traffic to a better-paying buyer instead — you don't lose the publisher, you just stop seeing their volume. PBM is how you test for that in both directions: raise a publisher's payout on a slice of their traffic to see if it wins back volume you were losing to a more competitive buyer, or lower it to see if there's margin sitting there that a flat rate was giving away for free.

Concretely: right now, you probably pay every publisher the same flat rate on a campaign — say, 85% of revenue — because you've never had a safe way to find out if some of them would keep sending you the exact same calls for less. That gap is margin you're leaving on the table every single day, and until now the only way to close it was to guess.

![image](/media/f7/f79a7974b789b1f3eeeb5a693a252e5987d4528107b43a9e3a978fda4f5cd858.png)
## What's new

Payout Bid Modification (PBM) helps networks run controlled experiments on their own payouts, so you can figure out — dynamically, from real traffic — whether there's an opportunity to increase margin. It lets you test a different payout on a slice of a publisher's traffic — instead of changing everyone's rate blind, you split their traffic into a Control group (unchanged) and a Treatment group (your new rate), so you can see the real impact before you commit to it network-wide. Nothing changes for a campaign until you upload a rules table, so this is entirely opt-in — the default behavior (one flat payout percentage) is exactly what you have today.

The split is deterministic and independently verifiable: every RTB ping gets a bucket (0-9999) derived from a salted hash of the call, so a publisher can recompute it themselves and confirm you applied the rule you said you would.

## How to use it

This is a new feature and needs to be turned on for your account — reach out to your Retreaver contact to get it enabled.

Once it's on, you upload a table of rules for a campaign. Each row matches a slice of traffic and says what to pay it — for example, testing a lower rate on half of publisher 482's traffic while leaving everything else exactly as it is today:

Rule | Publisher | Traffic slice | Payout
---- | --------- | -------------- | ------
1 | 482 | half of their traffic | 60% of revenue
2 | everyone else | the rest | unchanged

Rules are checked in order, first match wins — so publisher 482 pays 60% on that slice, and everything else (their other half, every other publisher) keeps paying whatever it pays today.

You're not limited to one test at a time, either. Say publisher 482 currently gets 85% and you want to test a gradient of lower rates in parallel, to see where the real floor is, while still keeping half their traffic as an untouched control:

Rule | Publisher | Traffic slice | Payout
---- | --------- | -------------- | ------
1 | 482 | 10% of their traffic | 60% of revenue
2 | 482 | next 10% | 65% of revenue
3 | 482 | next 10% | 70% of revenue
4 | 482 | next 10% | 75% of revenue
5 | 482 | next 10% | 80% of revenue

That's five rules covering the first 50% of their traffic. The remaining 50% isn't in the table at all — a slice you don't want to change is simply left out of the rules rather than given its own "unchanged" row, and it keeps paying 85% by default.

Export your RTB Inbounds data to measure the result — every row now carries `pbm_bucket`, `pbm_variant` (control/treatment), and `pbm_original_payout`, so you can compare what you paid against what you would have paid.

One thing worth being upfront about: Retreaver runs the rules, it doesn't tell you what they should be. Deciding the right rate for the right slice of traffic is on you.

## Access

Full access (create, update, deactivate, delete) requires a superuser role on the company. A Media Buyer role can view a campaign's tables and toggle a table active/inactive, but can't create or delete one. Without the right role, requests come back `403 Forbidden`.

Read the full guide: [Payout Bid Modification](https://learn.retreaver.com/guides/payout-bid-modification)