As an advertiser, there is no better way to purchase massive
amounts of online display ad inventory than directly from publishers or ad
networks. Granted, there is more legwork involved when compared to programmatic
buying, and the CPM rates can be quite high — but this is offset by the ability
to reserve large amounts of inventory.
When you’re buying media in bulk, the need for a proper ad
server is very important in terms of controlling your ad operations. You could
say that it’s a best practice to use your own ad server, especially if you run
a consistent volume of ad campaigns.
How Ad Servers Work Together
To illustrate why you need your own ad server, it is
important to first understand how ad servers work. In the below example, the
advertiser’s ad server is managing its campaigns across four different
publishers. This is accomplished by providing each publisher with their own
unique “ad tag” script (generated by the advertiser’s ad server), which the
publisher then inserts into its ad server associated with the corresponding
website.
You might be asking yourself: “If the publisher has an ad
server, why would I need my own?” Here are seven reasons.
1. Accountability
Tracking your own campaign statistics is probably the most
important reason you should have your own ad server. When you’ve been around
the online advertising space long enough, you come to realize that some degree
of discrepancy is inevitable. Mid single-digits percentages are pretty normal,
though it can vary wildly in different cases. With so many different ad tags
being served by so many different ad servers in various locations around the
world, it really shouldn’t be surprising that reporting will differ to some
degree.
Without your own ad server, you have no independent stats
against which to audit the results being reported by the publisher. The old
adage “trust, but verify” holds true when it comes to buying online media.
Having your own ad server allows you to keep publishers and ad networks
accountable.
2. Creative Control
Giving a publisher or ad network your ad tags to run in
their ad server gives you control over what ads are served to which users, and
how. From a creative perspective (depending on the ad server you use), you can
have more control over the format of your ads, such as running text ads, video ads
or expandable ads.
Beyond control of the ad formats being run, using your own
ad server affords you the ability to optimize delivery of your ads as well.
Your ad server can give you the ability to split-test different ads and weight
which will be shown accordingly.
3. Insights
Not using your own ad server means that you are at the mercy
of the publisher’s when it comes to mining campaign insights. The fact that
reporting transparency differs from publisher to publisher means that you will
likely be left with an incomplete picture.
Using your own ad server provides you with the greatest
possible transparency into the performance of your campaigns, giving you
insights that otherwise would not be visible. Using your own ad server, you can
look at placement stats, geographic stats, creative stats, and hourly stats,
all on multiple levels, to determine what is and what isn’t working.
4. Centralized
Management
Without your own ad server powering your direct buys, you
will oftentimes have to rely on the publisher’s ad operations team to create
and manage your campaigns. Multiply this by the number of publishers you work
with, and you can imagine how the logistical complexity increases dramatically.
With your own ad server, you centralize management of your
campaigns across all the publishers that you work with. You also aggregate all
of your campaign statistics in a single database. The benefit of this approach
is invaluable, which leads to the next reason to have your own ad server.
5. Data Ownership
One of the strongest arguments for using your own ad server,
in my opinion, is that you own and control all of your campaign data. If you
don’t have your own ad server and simply rely on publishers, you forfeit
ownership and control over your own reporting. Trust me on this one: you don’t want
to be beholden to a publisher or ad network for your historical campaign data.
6. Data Freshness
Publisher reporting practices vary. Some will report
campaign results daily, weekly, even monthly. Oftentimes, this will come in the
form of an email attachment. For some advertisers, this delay is acceptable;
for performance-driven marketers optimizing toward an effective goal, such
delays can mean costly, wasted ad spend.
In most cases, 3rd-party ad server reporting is close to
real time. Having your own ad server allows you to see exactly how your
campaigns are performing – up to the minute. This real-time reporting is
essential to making timely and actionable decisions.
7. Data Privacy
If the goal of your campaigns is return on ad spend (ROAS),
you will obviously want to be tracking revenue. However, you probably don’t
want publishers knowing how much you profit on their ad inventory (for obvious
reasons). Your own ad server gives you a discrete platform to confidentially
track your campaign performance metrics.
The Caveat: Cost
Having the luxury of your own ad server typically isn’t
free. There are some ad servers that offer free ad serving up to a certain
number of impressions, but any serious media buyer will blow those limits away
fairly quickly. The general cost of ad serving is anywhere from $0.01 to $0.10
CPM. You will also need to factor in content delivery network (CDN) costs,
which are passed along to advertisers and range from $0.02 to $0.06 per
gigabyte of transfer.
Checks & Balances
By not using your own ad server, you are pretty much flying
blind and giving publishers all the power in the relationship. From a business
perspective, it’s simply not prudent. This fact becomes especially important if
you are doing any degree of high-volume media buying across multiple
publishers.
Using your own ad server adds checks and balances to the
process of media buying. It also adds a level of consistency for the media
buyer, allowing all campaigns to be managed from a single point of control.
While the publisher ultimately controls the flow of traffic, you can keep
things on an even keel by leveraging a platform of your own to control and
monitor the ad campaigns that get served — and ensure you are getting what you
paid for.
Source: marketingland.com
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