To help publishers overcome increased latency, reduced user experience, complexity and data fragmentation, we’ve pulled together a guide of best practices that you can follow for this new technology. We call these best practices the “4 Golden Rules for Header Bidding Success”. To grab the white paper click at the bottom.
Over the course of the last two years, Header Bidding, an advertising programmatic technique that allows publishers to unify their auctions and get rid of waterfalls, has become a undisputed standard.
The technique was actually launched back in 2009. At this time, some emerging Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) were relying on it to run the first programmatic auctions. When the programmatic market truly took off a few years later, the auction process moved server-side and “Header Bidding” was completely forgotten.
But since then, the frustration for publishers has mounted: a lack of transparency, of buyer competition for programmatic inventory, waterfalls generating high opportunity costs, a high level of dependency on some ad tech vendors… the landscape was all set for Header Bidding to make a great come back.
The technique is now used by the most savvy publishers to create competition between multiple demand sources for the same impressions, simplifying the programmatic workflow and increasing revenue. And while we keep on talking about “Header” bidding, the solution has started to move far beyond page Headers, and can now be used “Server Side” or even within Video and Mobile App channels… where there is no Header!
Rather than describing a “technical implementation method”, Header Bidding now simply refers to the key concept of creating simultaneous competition for the same impressions. “Header” will thus keep on growing fast and address all sides of the programmatic market.
Still, while the idea behind Header Bidding is obvious to all of us, running an advertising tech stack that includes many different demand sources and optimizing monetization remains a challenge. Isn’t it funny how everytime you go to a Header conference, you learn how you’re doing something wrong or something completely new about managing yield? There is advice all over the place: on javascript and latency management, flooring practices, ad blocklist set-up, ad slots structuration, wrapper analytics and so on.
This is why we decided to compile some of the best practices that we have identified based on our own experience with publishers across the world. Consider it an exclusive look into Adomik’s top highlights that you should keep in the back of your mind. We call these best practices the “4 Golden Rules for Header Bidding success”:
- Rule 1: Getting Your Set-Up Right
- Rule 2: The Magic Number of Header Partners – Client & Server
- Rule 3: The Proper Use of Header Bidding Analytics
- Rule 4: Price Management in the Header
To download the white paper, click here:
But Header Bidding is still evolving fast. And we already have a few additional recommendations in store… stay tuned for more in the future!