Why Publisher Need Own Ad Server

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

Ad server – An Overview 

Computer system which stores, maintains and serves (uploads) advertising banners for one or more websites. Ad servers program, track, and report several statistics about website visitors which are used by advertisers to custom tailor ads and offers to suit different categories of visitors.

How Does Ad Serving Work?

Interactive ads are everywhere these days, but when it comes to the technical process of getting an ad on the page and how publishers and marketers verify it delivered, not many people can explain what actually happens in detail.  Read this article though and you’ll be one of them!  Below I’ve detailed step-by-step how a browser gets from the initial call to a publisher’s website to the final ad creative, and when and how each party counts an impression.  You can view a diagram of the ad serving process at the bottom of this post – the numbers in the text refer to the steps labeled in the diagram.

So, without further argument -

When a browser navigates to a publisher website (1), the publisher’s web server sends back a bunch of HTML code (2) that tells the browser where to get the content (3) and how to format it.  Part of the HTML code returned to the browser (4) will include a coded link known as an ad tag.

Here’s an example of what an ad tag from Doubleclick, one of the major ad serving companies, looks like:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ABC/publisher/zone;topic=abc;sbtpc=def;cat=ghi;kw=xyz;tile=1;slot=728x90.1;sz=728x90;ord=7268140825331981?

The ad tag points the browser to the Publisher’s Ad Server (5), a system designed exclusively for delivering and tracking advertising.  In most cases, the Publisher’s Ad Server is actually a network of cloud servers owned and maintained by a separate company.  In this case, the content server tells the browser to fetch the ad from Doubleclick, a company owned by Google that then makes the very complex decision on which ad to serve using a program called an Ad Selector.

In many cases the ad server is deciding among thousands upon thousands of potential options in mere milliseconds.  The computational power behind the Ad Selector is mind blowing – Atlas, the major rival to Doubleclick calls the supercomputer running its Ad Selector “WARP” and it is among the most powerful in the world, making billions of decisions a day and trillions in its lifetime. 

The Ad Server makes a decision, and in most cases sends back another ad tag (6), or redirects the browser by pointing it to the Marketer’s Ad Server.  These redirects are technically speaking 302 redirects, which tell the browser the page has been “temporarily moved”. 

This allows Ad Servers to count the 302 call as an impression and host the actual ad content on a different server.  Once the publisher’s ad server sends the browser a redirect to the marketer, it counts a delivered impression in its own database (star).  The only exception here is if the publisher decides to deliver a house ad or the marketer has asked the publisher to “site-serve” the ads, both of which requires the publisher load the actual creative files into their ad server, meaning the publisher is the final destination, and the browser can skip the loop through the marketer side (steps 7,8,11,12).

The browser now calls the Marketer’s Ad Server (7) and is redirected yet again to a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, (8) a global network of cloud servers that actually house the raw creative graphics to fetch the actual Ad. 

Why, you ask?  Well, as powerful as ad servers are, they just aren’t equipped to handle the volume and bandwidth required to deliver content as heavy as image files.  Redirects are often nothing more than a 1×1 pixel requiring just a few bytes of memory.  Image files on the other hand are kilobytes or even megabytes in size, could be called millions of times a day, and require a much faster and robust infrastructure. 

Ad Servers might maintain three to six data centers across the world, but a CDN can process the heavy bandwidth and deliver the content faster because they operate hundreds of data centers and can route requests to the one nearest to the user, no matter where they are on earth.  You can think of the ad server as the brain and the CDN as the brawn.  Ad Servers aren’t the only companies that use CDNs; in fact many websites host their bandwidth intensive files in these cloud networks.  A CDN is almost always another independent company, such as Akamai, that hosts the heavy creative assets so the Ad Server doesn’t have to. There used to be a handful of these companies out there, but Akamai has acquired almost all of them and is the largest player by far in the space.

Here’s what a CDN redirect to an Akamai server hosting a flash file looks like:

http://spe.atdmt.com/ds/ABCDEF12334/filename123_300x250.swf

In addition to sending back the redirect to the CDN, the Marketer’s Ad Server also appends a second redirect (10) back to itself with a query string to fetch a 1×1 pixel (11) after the ad content has been called.  When the browser fires this last redirect calling a 1×1 pixel from the Marketer’s Ad Server (11), the Ad Server knows the ad was successfully downloaded and it finally counts an impression in its own database (star).

In many cases, your browser has to make at least four calls for site served ads and six in the case of third-party served ads for this whole process to work, if not even more, but shouldn’t take more than a second regardless of the number of parties involved. To visualize the process explained above, please see the diagram below – 302 redirects are highlighted in blue, and the ad creative is highlighted in red.

Source: www.businessdictionary.com and www.adopsinsider.com