Ad serving
Online Advertising
Ad serving
Central ad server | Contextual advertising
Ad serving describes the technology and service that places
advertisements on
web
sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites
and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make
the web site or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different
advertising campaigns.
Two types of internet companies use ad serving: web sites and advertisers.
The main purpose of using an ad server is different for both of them:
For a web site, the ad server needs to look through all the ads
available to serve to a user who is on a page, and choose the one that will make
the web site the most money, but still conform to the rules that the advertiser
and web site have agreed. For example if a web site has 10 different advertisers
that have paid for a big square ad, the ad server must decide which one to serve
(or display). One advertiser may have only agreed to pay for ads from 9am - 5pm.
If it is after 5pm, then the Ad Server must not serve that one. Another
advertiser may only have paid to show one ad to each user per day. The ad server
must therefore see if a user has seen that ad before, on that day and not serve
it again if the user has seen it. Another advertiser may have agreed a high
price, but only if the person watching the page is in the
United States. In that case, the Ad Server needs to check the IP address
to determine if the user is in the US and then decide which is the highest
paying ad for that user, in the US, at that time, given what that user has seen
in the past.
For an advertiser the ad server needs to try to serve the ad that is
most likely to result in a
sale of the product
advertised. For example if a user is viewing a page, the advertiser's ad server
needs to decide from previous history, what ad that user is most likely to click
on and then buy the product advertised. If the user is on a technology page,
then the ad server may know that on technology types of pages, the ad that works
best is a blue one with mostly text and pricing and numbers, not the green ad
with a picture of a model and little text. The ad server will therefore serve
this ad, to try and get the highest probability of a sale from the ad.
Ad Serving is most complex when it is used by an Advertising Network. An
advertising network buys ads from many web sites and therefore acts like an
advertiser user of Ad Serving. When the network buys ads, it tries to place ads
on sites where they work best. However an ad network then sells its aggregated
ad inventory to advertisers. When doing this, it uses its Ad Serving software as
a web site does. In this case it tries to make the most money by only running
the ads from advertisers that pay most.
Examples of Ad Serving companies are:
- AdSense
by Google
- DoubleClick
- e-planning
- ValueClick, who acquired rival
Mediaplex
in 2001
- ZEDO
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This guide is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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