Header Bidding for Website Publishers

Web Publishers wish to maximize their revenue by selling their ad inventory in a way that ensures they get the best price. One way to achieve this is by using programmatic advertising. Ad Tech. short for advertising technology is a part of publisher revenue strategy that works discreetly in the background.

For example, when you visit a website or app, the web page loads. Next, Ad Tag (a snippet of HTML code in the webpage) triggers a call to the website publisher’s ad server with ad request. The publisher’s ad server analyzes user’s (your) data and makes a request to either an ad exchange or ad network.  Once the winning bid is picked, this info is passed back to the publisher’s ad server. The winner’s ad is shown in the ad space of the website you just visited. All this happens in just a few milliseconds without you even being aware of it. While this strategy is mostly successful, sometimes publishers miss revenue opportunities when there are no takers for their impressions from the chosen ad network/exchange.

Header Bidding Solution: What it is and why it matters

Header bidding is an important advancement in ad tech which uses scripts in the page header. The header of a web page is the portion which loads first and header bidding is an auction that takes place in the header in collaboration with multiple ad networks and exchanges. Using this technique, bid requests are sent simultaneously to all the demand partners (both direct campaigns and programmatic). This puts all demand partners on an equal footing and helps to get the best bid for an impression. This leads to significant increase in revenue for publishers.

How Header Bidding maximizes ad revenue

Header bidding offers the following benefits:

  • The best price for advertising space: Header bidding exposes ad inventory to a greater number of advertisers and makes auctions more competitive. This pushes up CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions) rates and causes more ad spaces to be filled. Header bidding ensures that the publisher gets the best offer for an impression.
  • Income diversification: When publishers work with more partners, their income sources are diversified and this helps to overcome the risk of over-reliance on a single partner.
  • Scale solution on demand: The decision logic for picking bidding partners is implemented in a container known as wrapper. This enables publishers to easily add or remove partners and scale their solution.
  • Transparency: Publishers can analyze and compare the performance of each ad request using log-level data and work on tweaks to maximize yield.
  • Improve website load time: Since the auction is conducted with multiple partners simultaneously and within a cut-off time, it decreases the time to render the ad and improves the user experience.
  • In-app header bidding: Even though, mobile app advertisers have been slower than their web counterparts to adopt it, header bidding offers them the same opportunity to increase revenue streams.

Key Takeaway

Header Bidding plays a large role in Ad Tech. by bringing significant advantages to both publishers and their counterparts not only in web advertising but also in the mobile space.  Header Bidding helps publishers reach revenue goals while sustaining the positive synergy of the overall Ad Tech ecosystem.

About Us

As a leading provider of digital publishing solutions, diacriTech not only uses emerging technologies but also programmatic advertising to create websites and the best possible user experiences.  For any further queries, please contact marketing@diacritech.com.

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