Ad Serving Technology

Video Advertising Platform defines the service and technology placing advertisements on websites. Ad serving technology companies are providing software to advertisers and websites to serve ads, count them, select the ads that are going to make the advertiser or website most money, and will monitor the progress of various advertising campaigns. The purpose of ad server is to deliver ads to users, managing the advertising space of a website, providing an independent tracking, and counting system for advertisers. Moreover, ad serving performs other different tasks, which helps to determine the Return of Investment for a certain website or advertiser. Ad serving can be locally run or by third party or remote d servers. Local ad servers are most commonly run by one publisher and serve ads to the domains of the publisher, enabling fine-grained creative, content control, and formatting by the publisher.

Why you need an ad serving technology

As an advertiser, there will be no better way of purchasing massive amounts of online ad display inventory as compared to directly from ad networks or publishers. There is more legwork involved than programmatic purchasing, and the rates of CPM can be high, but it is offset by the capability or reserving large amounts of inventory. When you are purchasing media in bulk, the necessity for a proper ad serving technology is very essential when it comes to controlling your ad operations. You may say that it is a best practice to use your own ad server, more importantly if you are running a consistent volume of ad campaigns.

To be able to understand why you need your own ad server, it is essential that you first understand how ad serving technology work. You may be asking yourself about if the publisher has ad server, why do you need to have your own. Knowing the reasons will help you understand it further, and come to get the best out of your ad server.

1. Creative control – To give an ad network or publisher your ad tags in order to run in their ad server will give you control over what ads are being served to which users, and how. Depending on the ad serving technology you are using and from a creative perspective, you will be able to have control over the format of your ads like running video ads, expandable ads, or text ads. Beyond control of the ad formats that are run, using your own ad server gives you the capability of optimizing delivery of your ads too. Your ad server will be able to give you the capability of split testing various ads and weight.
2. Accountability – To track your own statistics of campaign is probably the most essential reason that you need to have your own ad serving technology. When you have been around the advertising space online long enough, you come to realize that some discrepancy degree is inevitable. The percentages of mid-single digits are normal, even though it may vary wildly in various cases. With different ad tags that are being served by lots of ad servers in different locations all over the world, it is not surprising that reporting will become different to some degree. Without your own ad server, you depend on statistics about which to audit the reported results by the publisher.
3. Data ownership – One of the biggest arguments for using your own ad serving technology is that you control and own all of your campaign data.
4. Insights – Not using your own ad server means you are at the mercy of the publisher in terms of the insights of mining campaign. The fact that reporting transparency is different from one publisher to another means you will be left with an incomplete picture. Using you own ad server will provide you with the greatest possible transparency in the performance of your campaigns, giving you insights that would not be visible otherwise. Through ad serving technology, you will be able to look at the geographic stats, hourly stats, placement stats, and creative stats, all on different levels, in order to determine what is and is not working.
5. Data privacy – If the objective of your campaign is the Return on Ad Space or ROAS, you would most likely want to track revenue. Nevertheless, you do not probably want the publishers to know how much you profit on their ad inventory. Your own server will give you a discrete platform to track your performance metrics of your campaign confidentially.
6. Freshness of data – The publisher that reports practices are varying. Some will be reporting campaign results every day, every week, even every month. Usually, this will come in the form of an email attachment. For some advertisers, this sort of delay is acceptable, for the marketers who optimize toward an effective objective, this delay can mean wasted and costly ad serving technology.
7. Centralized management – With ad server, you can centralize the management of your campaigns throughout all of the publishers you are working with. You can also aggregate all your campaign statistics in a single database. The advantage of this approach is invaluable, which will lead to the next reason of having your own ad serving technology.

Only you will be able to decide if an ad server would be the next step for your business. For a small business just getting started, and with limited budget, it can be more prudent to do some testing on your own before you use an ad server. After all, ad servers demand a particular investment when it comes to money and time. However, when you are ready scaling up your monetization efforts, an ad server will be able to help you in yielding better returns for your inventory. While it could take you some time to be able to learn the ins and outs of an ad serving technology, as soon as you have figured it out, you will find that it is a more efficient way of managing your ad inventory.

Video Ads Platform server is a huge step for any business, and it is something that you must think carefully about and research before you get started. You may find that it is your next logical step to grow your business.