For example, in the digital advertising landscape, programmatic advertising has revolutionized how advertisements are bought and sold, using technology to automate the process and deliver targeted, data-driven campaigns. This has only been further compounded by the emergence of ‘Header Bidding,’ which offers a more streamlined and efficient way for publishers to monetize their inventory and for advertisers to reach their desired audience. 

A recent study showed that header bidding led to a 23% increase in fill rate and a 20% increase in average CPM. With these benefits and more, it’s no wonder why header bidding has become a popular and essential tool for publishers looking to maximize their monetization potential.

What Is Header Bidding and How Does It Work?

Header bidding, or pre-bid or advanced bidding, is a programmatic advertising technology. It is a real-time programmatic auction where multiple demand partners bid on a single impression. 

Header bidding allows publishers to offer their ad inventory to multiple SSPs (Supply-Side Platforms), ad networks, and ad exchanges to bid before sending the bid call to the ad server. This results in a more competitive and transparent bidding process, as demand sources compete against each other for the same inventory in real-time.

Behind the Scenes:

Header bidding works by incorporating a JavaScript code snippet into the header of the publisher’s website. So, when a user visits a page, this JS code sends out an ad call to all configured demand partners to bid on the available ad units. While the header auction happens, Google Publisher Tag is paused. Once the bids are received, they are sent to the ad server for the second auction round. Based on the configuration set by the publisher, the ad server filters out the winning bid and serves the creative on the user’s page. 

What’s interesting to note here is that all these auctions happen while the page loads on the user’s browser. And as soon as the page loads, the aim is to display the ads at the required places. 

Benefits of Header Bidding

Before header bidding, publishers and advertisers relied on the ‘Waterfall or Daisy-Chaining’ method to buy and sell media. In waterfall, a series of demand partners sent ad requests, each given a priority based on their past performance and the estimated value of the ad inventory. So, if a demand partner sitting at level 1 cannot fill the ad request, the bidding call will go to the next bidding partner sitting at level 2. The bid request will keep on moving down until it is sold off. 

As the bid request trickles down the hierarchy, it often results in a slow and inefficient process, with many ad impressions going unsold. Also, as the partners are arranged based on their past performances, it might happen that a bidder who is willing to bid more but is sitting at level 2 or 3 might never get a chance to bid. The method lacks transparency and limits the ability of publishers to earn maximum revenue.

Header bidding evolved as a replacement for the waterfall method and brought great relief to the users as it allowed:

1. Increased competition: Header bidding allows multiple demand sources to bid on the same inventory simultaneously, leading to increased competition and higher CPMs for publishers.
2. Improved transparency: It provides greater visibility into the bidding process, allowing publishers to understand the value of their inventory better and make informed decisions. 
3. Faster load times: Header bidding enables publishers to load bids from multiple demand sources in parallel, reducing latency and increasing the number of impressions served. The bidding happens during a fixed timeframe. 
4. Flexibility: It allows publishers to make real-time adjustments to bidding strategies, enabling them to optimize for specific inventory and respond quickly to changes in market conditions.
5. Better targeting: Header bidding provides more advanced targeting capabilities as publishers can share relevant data with the demand sources in real-time. This, in turn, allows advertisers to reach specific audience segments and helps publishers increase revenue by providing more personalized ad experiences to the users.

How to Set up Header Bidding?

Setting up header bidding can be complex, but it’s worth the effort. The first step involves the integration of a header bidding wrapper, a piece of JavaScript code that is placed in the header of a publisher’s website. The wrapper communicates with demand sources, allowing them to bid on inventory in real-time. Once the container is in place, publishers can integrate demand partners, such as ad exchanges, SSPs, and ad networks. They will also need to configure the settings to meet their specific needs.

Owing to the technical complexity of the setup, it’s always advisable to look out for a header bidding provider. A good header bidding provider will handle the setup, bring in good demand sources, and offer complete transparency. 

Wrapping up

The benefits of header bidding are numerous, and for publishers looking to maximize their revenue, it is an essential tool in their arsenal. By partnering with a trusted header bidding provider, publishers can access the latest technology, expert support, and valuable insights to help them achieve their revenue goals. 

With the right partner, the benefits of header bidding are endless, and publishers can rest assured that they are making the most of their ad inventory and reaching their target audience with the most effective and relevant advertising. 

The post How Can Publishers Boost Their Ad Revenue with Header Bidding? appeared first on AdMonsters.

In 2021, every major tech firm, holding company, and large brand made carbon-neutral commitments, but putting them into practice is difficult. The number of ways to calculate emissions and the ensuing cottage industry of companies offering to help quickly highlighted the need for standardization across the programmatic landscape. 

 At ALM, IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur repeatedly said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” To remedy this, Tech Lab has partnered with trade organization AdNetZero, which is working to determine a standardized framework for emissions calculation. 

This essential, complicated, and nuanced task will take time to complete. Because the planet doesn’t have that time to wait, Tech Lab will use proprietary solutions from members who have donated their expertise and already available information on the programmatic supply chain. 

IAB Tech Lab Strategies for Implementing the ‘green Initiative’

Companies can try a few different things to reduce the amount of carbon emitted through our supply chains, the exact amount of which will vary by the myriad ways to calculate emissions. Which party calculates the emissions number and the methodology employed is up to the companies involved in the transaction. The consensus around the carbon number and its calculation are not necessary to drive action around lowering the amount of duplicative and wasteful processing. 

Fewer signals – especially those that result from duplication in the bid stream – means less energy gets used. Said simply, unnecessary duplication of signals equals waste.

The January RTB Supply Path Benchmarking report from consulting firm Jounce media estimates that 45% and 37% of all ad requests for display and video (respectively) do not have sales exclusivity and are re-broadcasted. This creates indirect supply paths, which, when talking about an industry with trillions of impressions being traded daily, is an awful lot of signals being sent and received, all of which require energy. The resulting carbon impact should be carefully evaluated between buy and sell side partners.

We need to lower the amount of data processed in trillions of daily ad requests. The IAB Tech Lab has committed to publishing programmatic best practices alongside their quantified carbon impact from sustainability vendors like Scope3 and Cedara.IO, who are part of the working group. To educate the industry, we will publish benchmarks using existing data on supply paths. In the future, we will update models to include emissions data from Ad Net Zero’s Calculation framework.

The ‘green Initiative’ Pledge 

In today’s economy, it is vital that the solutions we deliver work for everyone — creating a big tent involving any IAB Tech Lab member who wants to be part of the conversation. That includes multiple sustainability vendors, DSPs, Agencies, Publishers, and SSPs, which will ensure that all sides are represented. 

Is this just greenwashing? Maybe for some, but intent doesn’t matter. The demand side has already started biasing media investment toward suppliers actively trying to clean up convoluted supply paths, thereby lowering carbon emissions. IAB Tech Lab is committed to educating the ecosystem, promoting and quantifying best practices, supporting transparency into industry benchmarks, and providing telemetry. 

 In 2023, the green initiative within IAB Tech Lab has committed to the following:

• Creating a working group open to all Tech Lab members to collaborate on different avenues to lower carbon emissions in the programmatic supply chain
• Collating and re-publishing programmatic best practices and the quantified carbon emissions wasted by not following the guidance 
• Expanding into topics that create waste within the programmatic supply chain but have lacked official specification 
•  Iteratively adding benchmarks to the Tools Portal, starting with information already available from ads.txt/app-ads.txt and sellers.json entries and expanding to carbon emissions and more based on input from the working group.

This initiative is more significant than any single publisher, advertiser, ad tech company, or trade group. The passion and intention are evident to anyone looking. But to succeed, the entire advertising ecosystem must commit the time, expertise, and investment required to impact the industry materially. 

Read our dedicated announcement here to learn more about Tech Lab’s commitment to this topic in 2023 and beyond.

The post What Is IAB Tech Lab’s ‘Green Initiative’? appeared first on AdMonsters.

The marketplace hasn’t made clarity on this terminology easy. There’s programmatic guaranteed, programmatic direct, preferred deals, and (although we hear about this one less often) automated guaranteed. None of these are the same thing, but some of these terms can get jumbled together in conversation—probably because they all sound like they would mean the same thing.

Not to confuse things further, but programmatic guaranteed and real-time guaranteed are the same thing. The term you use will depend on what you and your ad tech partners prefer. But they refer to the same process.

Decoder isn’t the forum to break down the product or process each of these terms describes, although if you’d like a guide, AdMonsters contributor Will Rand did a good job of that earlier this year in his extensive exploration of private marketplaces.

Programmatic guaranteed belongs in Will’s PMP series because it’s one iteration (of a few) of what you might call “the next stage of PMPs.” PMPs, as most of us know, were supposed to allow buyers to transact programmatically, but in a walled-garden environment of known-entity publishers. But publishers soon noticed there was often a difference between what buyers said they were going to spend in PMPs, and what they actually spent. There wasn’t a mechanism to make buyers spend. Buyers, at the same time, often found PMPs didn’t give them the scale they wanted, once they layered in all their targeting and other criteria. It made PMPs feel like a lot of work for low reward, and that made people start wondering about what the industry could develop that’s sort of like PMPs, but better.

Enter programmatic guaranteed. As with PMPs, you have Deal IDs, so sellers and buyers can enable transactions on predetermined criteria. But there are a couple key differences: One, the buyer agrees beforehand to spend a certain amount. Two, the transaction doesn’t necessarily happen entirely within a walled garden. The process syncs up the publisher’s audience and the buyer’s audience to find however many impressions fit the targeting/criteria the buyer needs. That removes some of the uncertainty of PMPs—the publisher knows they’re getting paid, and the buyer knows they’re reaching the size audience they want.

We’ve seen a lot of different attempts to get to “the next generation of PMPs,” which gets confusing when you try to explain your strategies to partners, and vice versa. But if you’re transacting programmatically and have to guarantee delivery, what you’re doing is probably programmatic guaranteed.

Programmatic guaranteed blurs the line between programmatic and direct—but then again, so do a lot of things in 2017. This came up last night, at AdMonsters’ OpsX event in New York. Often, when we talk about “blurring the line between programmatic and direct,” we sound pretty excited about it, because “direct” brings to mind “big bucks up front.” But “direct” also implies closer relationships between publishers and advertisers. You need to have conversations, you need to work out the details of contracts ahead of time, and you need to train programmatic and ops people to think about business relationships similarly to how sales people do.

And of course, part of that means making sure everyone understands what we’re talking about. If it feels like the definition of “programmatic guaranteed” is still malleable, one person at OpsX said last night, that means publishers have an opportunity to firm it up and define the terminology for advertisers.

AdMonsters Resources:

The New Dichotomy (2017)

The ABCs of PMPs: Part I (2016)

The Dawn of Real-Time Guaranteed: An Interview With OpenX’s Dmitri Kazanski (2016)

The post What Is Programmatic Guaranteed? appeared first on AdMonsters.

In theory, PMPs were created to combine the most appealing elements of direct sales and the programmatic marketplace. The promise of programmatic is that it allowed advertisers to buy audience rather than buy into specific sites. On the one hand, that allowed for a degree of discovery on both the buy and the sell side—brands could find their audiences where perhaps they wouldn’t expect to look, publishers could understand the value of their audience to buyers they didn’t have prior relationships with. On the other hand, there are a lot of unknowns in the open exchange, including brand safety concerns for both advertisers and publishers. So with a PMP, advertisers could be certain they were bidding on inventory in what they would consider premium environments, and publishers could be certain they were getting demand from premium buyers (“premium” being a relative value to everyone).

A PMP is still a programmatic transaction, a real-time auction at a basic level—but there are manual components. Everyone in the PMP needs to set up a Deal ID. We’ve explained Deal IDs in an earlier Decoder, but basically, the way it works is: the buyer and seller know beforehand that they want to work together, so they negotiate terms for the transaction, delineate any criteria that need to be respected (including floor prices, audience targeting and placements), and a bit of unique code is generated that allows the buyer and seller to identify each other in the PMP.

In a PMP, preferred buyers may have the opportunity to bid at a previously-agreed-upon fixed price—which could end up being lower than what the same inventory would fetch in the open exchange. If any or all buyers who have been given that first-look access take a pass on the impression, it goes up for auction within the PMP. If no one bids there, the impression goes back into the open exchange.

Of course, there are a lot of things in ad tech that don’t necessarily play out in practice the way they do on paper, and the PMP setup for display is one of them. Publishers note that they’ve gone through the trouble of setting up Deal IDs, with no guarantee that buyers would actually bid with any consistency, or at all. Buyers, on their part, haven’t always seen the scale they’d hoped for, or even seen their target audiences, in PMPs. Those dissatisfactions have pushed the development of other direct/programmatic hybrid transactions. Take programmatic guaranteed: It uses Deal IDs to enable transactions on predetermined criteria; but unlike PMPs, the buyer agrees to a certain amount of spend beforehand, and the transaction doesn’t necessarily happen within a walled-garden environment. There are other terms for other methods that split the difference between programmatic and direct, which gets complicated in part because different vendors like to give different names to fairly similar things, maybe adding a proprietary twist.

Video PMPs appear to have delivered more success stories than display, though. There’s much less premium inventory out there in video than in display, and video PMPs eliminate certain risks in an environment that generally perceived as bring pretty risky. And for publishers, there’s more money to be made in video than in display, which makes it easier to justify setting up the deals in the first place.

AdMonsters Resources:

Ad Ops Decoder: What Is Deal ID? (2017)

The ABCs of PMPs (2016)

Native in the Walled Garden: Native PMPs Take Root for CafeMedia (2016)

More Power to PMPs: A Conversation with Justin Kennedy of Sonobi (2016)

Playbook: Private Marketplaces and Advanced Studies in Programmatic Video (2015)

Forging Forward: Unlocking PMP Potential (2015)

Private Exchange Playbook (2013)

The post What Are Private Marketplaces? appeared first on AdMonsters.

The Deal ID is a series of numerals shared by the buyer and the seller so that when the bid request comes in, it and the impression say to each other, “Here’s a particular buyer, here’s a particular seller, the two of them have an existing deal together, and this bid is about that deal.”

Not every preferred deal in programmatic uses Deal IDs. There’s an alternative—just tags—that preceded Deal IDs in PMPs and are still used in some cases (for example, if the buyer’s SSP and the seller’s DSP aren’t integrated). But Deal IDs have achieved widespread adoption, if not universal praise, in the last few years, especially over the course of 2014. One Deal ID can contain a set of criteria that otherwise would have required a whole bunch of tags. It’s not command code, so it doesn’t get in the way of any other functionality when the ad and page load. It can help advertisers track KPIs (in real time) within the DSP, too, rather than replying on the publisher’s reporting (after the campaign is over).

What’s in this “set of criteria?” Depends on what you want. You can think of a Deal ID as an IO for programmatic, and it can be about as robust as an IO in a direct deal. The buyer and the seller will have already worked out those terms. They can agree on pricing, type of units, section of site, placement on the page—anything, really. Once the deal is agreed upon, the publisher creates the Deal ID through its SSP. The pub manually passes it along to the buyer (brand, media agency or trading desk). The buyer will insert the number into their DSP.

It’s possible for one impression to have multiple Deal IDs attached to it, so it can run in multiple PMPs. Those PMPs will be evaluated against each other, provided all their tech partners allow this kind of scenario.

In the auction, the SSP uses the Deal ID to call to DSPs. The SSP needs to make this step—this is programmatic, so it’s possible there’s some characteristic in the impression that would make the DSP want to pass on it unless it were reminded it’s part of a previously negotiated deal.

There’s a lot that can be communicated within the number string of a simple Deal ID. It helps make the prospect of something like a PMP or programmatic guaranteed much more feasible. But not everyone is crazy about how they work. Heck, some people still prefer tags, if they have the choice.

Running a Deal ID does involve extra steps. Negotiations of deals themselves may be time-consuming. If the buyer’s DSP and the publisher’s SP are not already integrated, you’ll need to use tags to get Deal ID to work. Someone on the publisher side has to send the number to someone on the buy side, via an email or a doc, and the buyer has to copy it in the DSP. (You might be surprised, or not, about how common human errors are in those steps.) The criteria communicated by a Deal ID are robust, but they’re not universally standard functions across all DSPs and SSPs. For some people, the whole process is just plain annoying, and it underlines the ways in which the worlds of programmatic and direct are not compatible.

Some tech providers have hinted at what they would like to see the next iteration of Deal ID to be. For now, Deal ID has the functionality and the adoption to be the common currency for PMPs.

AdMonsters Resources:

The ABCs of PMPs (2016)

Playbook: Private Marketplaces and Advanced Studies in Programmatic Video (2015)

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