Prebid.js, the most popular header bidding technology, was initially launched back in 2015. According to its creators, the goal was to “make header bidding easy for publishers by bringing conformity and simplicity to the header bidding process”. Today, Prebid has become the most widely used header bidding wrapper on the web. It is an open-source technology that allows anyone to build on it, using one simple optimized foundation. It also offers the largest repository of working header bidding adapters. In this article, we’ll discover what exactly are header bidding adapters and look at a few examples. What is a Header Bidding Adapter? Header bidding adapters are a piece of code that is used to create bid requests and process these requests to a specific demand partner. Each programmatic partner that the publisher wants to include in their header bidding setup has its own adapter, which must be added to the wrapper. The adapter carries the bid request along with information about the ad size, type, and format. The most popular header bidding adapter is non-surprisingly that of the most popular header bidding wrapper – Prebid.js. Prebid is a free open-source header bidding technology, which has the largest repository of working adapters, supporting over 300 demand partners and 50 analytics providers. There can sometimes be compatibility issues between different adapters in one container, in which case the adapters could be adjusted by either the buyer or the wrapper management party. Types of adapters Prebid offers two types of adapters for publishers:…
Header bidding has become the buzzword of the last few years and its widespread adoption by the ad tech world means there’s a reason for that. It maximizes demand competition for every ad impression and boosts revenues. Soon after header bidding’s rise, Google introduced Exchange Bidding, or EBDA (Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation). It was meant as an alternative to header bidding that required much less publisher involvement. Today, Google’s product is known as Open Bidding. In this article, we’ll take a look at both header bidding and Open Bidding, how they compare to each other, and how publishers can decide which one to use. What is Header Bidding? A technology that allows multiple ad exchanges to simultaneously bid on the publisher’s ad inventory before a call to the ad server. It can be implemented client-side (i.e. browser-side), and/or server-side. Both ways have their pros and cons, but the main goal is to reach a larger number of demand sources than with the traditional waterfall method and hold the auctions in a transparent and efficient way. Today, publishers can choose from multiple header bidding demand partners and use open-source, proprietary, or managed wrappers to streamline the process. Chances are, if you’re monetizing your website, you are using header bidding or considering it. Naturally, with header bidding’s adoption getting wider and wider, Google had to offer its own version. Enter Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation (EBDA). Now known as Open Bidding. What is Open Bidding? Open bidding is Google’s server-to-server technology…
If you are monetizing your website with Google Adsense, either as a main method or as a backfill, you need to comply with Google’s policies in order to stay in the game. Familiarizing yourself with the rules and guidelines of the technological giant is one way to approach the matter. Another useful practice is to check if you are committing any of the most common violations. This will help you fix any unintentional mistakes and prevent you from getting banned for serious offenses. So let’s take a look at some of the most common Google AdSense violations. Clicking on ads on your website. Asking or paying others to do so. This simply isn’t fair play. If you were the advertiser, you wouldn’t want to pay for clicks by users who aren’t genuinely interested in your product or service. Therefore, you must not click on ads on your own website or try to “artificially inflate the impressions or clicks the ads receive, either through automated or manual means.”* This includes a ban for any activity that incentivizes users to refresh and/or click on ads, such as offering rewards, asking users to support your website by interacting with the ads on your site or using a third-party service that generates clicks or impressions. Don’t ask your friends or family to do it either, as any repeated clicks are considered a violation as well and may cause you more harm than good. Note that you (or your testers) are not supposed to test…
Header bidding has been around for several years already and quickly became a hot topic for publishers, advertisers, and all people ad tech. Today, it is well adopted by the industry, promising fast and fair competition and higher returns. The beginning, however, wasn’t one without flaws, and the technology is still developing. For example, in the early days of header bidding, publishers had to put numerous tags in their headers in order to increase demand, which in turn, led to latency issues. A fix for this issue was quickly discovered with header bidding wrappers. Over time, further innovation brought the trading process to the server itself, whereas in the beginning, it was an in-browser solution only (known as client-side header bidding). In this article, we’ll dig deeper into server-side header bidding, its advantages, and disadvantages. What is Server-Side Header Bidding? Also known as server-to-server header bidding, or S2S, server-side header bidding is the latest development in header bidding, which allows the auction to happen at the server, instead of the browser, thus minimizing latency and allowing for increased demand partner capacity. To better understand the differences between browser- and server-side header bidding, let’s first take a quick look at the browser(client)-side. With this option, advertisers place their bids inside the header of the webpage. A high number of header bidding partners in the auction can mean more delays, thus publishers will often put a cap on demand and end up with somewhat inefficient ad performance. The technology is limited by…