Placing adverts across multiple websites (servers and networks)

Written by Joseph Pamboris, Digital Operations Account Director, OMD UK/MG OMD

What is an ad server

An ad server is the software used to deliver display advertising and clickable text-based ads to the person’s internet browser. The ad server typically is responsible for selecting the appropriate ad to serve. It is also responsible for administrative tasks including the counting of impressions and clicks, and reporting on campaign performance.

What is a third-party ad server?

A third-party ad server is independent to the company serving the advertisements. A third-party ad server is considered to be a trusted provider of data that should regularly stick to guidelines as set out by industry bodies such as the IAB.

Ad servers allow the advertiser to place their ads on multiple websites and monitor their performance. By assigning your creative to multiple placements implemented into the ad server, the ad server will then turn this creative into code which is passed onto sites. This code does not change once sent over (provided the placement size remains the same). Therefore the advertiser can manually update or change creative themes without the need to resend to every single site on the plan.

Before the campaign starts the advertiser or agency inputs the placements into the ad server. The creatives are uploaded and assigned to the corresponding placements and the ad server converts each placement into a piece of code which is sent to publisher sites.

In the same way as for print advertising, the network/publisher (not the ad server) is responsible for when these ads are shown; but the advertiser using an ad server will have control of what creative to show at any given time. This allows for a change to an ad being made once a campaign is live, resulting in an update of multiple websites within minutes.

Networks

Networks are sales houses that serve the advertising to several different websites. Some of them tell you the sites you can run your advertising on, while others run as blind networks – where you don’t know all site content. By providing creative code to the network they will serve your advertising message across several different websites within minutes. Networks themselves will use an ad server to determine when your ads run, where they will be running, even who they will be serving the advertisements to.

How ad serving works

1. Consumer goes to the publisher site.

2. Publisher’s ad server calls advertiser’s ad server for the ad files.

3. Ad files are sent to the site via advertiser’s ad server and served on the site.

4. Every ad call (impression) and user click on each advert is recorded
and logged by the ad server for reporting purposes.

Discrepancies

If for any reason the call from the publisher ad server does not reach the advertiser’s ad server it is likely that discrepancies will occur among the two ad servers’ stats. Discrepancies are quite common and can happen for many reasons, however the IAB is looking at ways of minimising this and working closely with agencies, publishers and ad servers to document best practice for avoiding high discrepancies between stats.

Benefits of using an ad server

There are many benefits to using an ad server including:

• Full control of your campaign.

• Gives you the ability to monitor reach and frequency.

• Creative targeting: creative can be changed in minutes allowing you to choose which creatives are working best for each site making live optimisation easy.

• Creative rotation: send sequential advertisements, segment audiences to test creative messaging, landing page.

• You can monitor true impression count by reconciling your ad server stats with that of the publisher.

• You can monitor sales, leads and page impressions via the use of a tracking tag which can determine if the user had seen or clicked on a specific ad in your campaign - useful for ROI or CPA.

• All reporting can be accessed in one place; there’s no need to have to combine several reports and spend time matching up your campaign results.

Benefits of using a network

• Ability to serve to a high reach of internet users quickly. Some of the bigger networks are capable of serving to 10.5m unique users in one day.

• High reach allows a range of different demographic profiles to target to.

• Networks generally have low cost per transaction (CPT) charges due to economies of scale and the fact that a lot of the inventory is left over.

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