RTB Ad Server

Real-time bidding (RTB) is how impressions are bought and sold in an auction for every single ad request. GoAdserver works on both sides of it.

As an SSP it sells your ad zones to outside demand partners, so more buyers compete for every impression. As a DSP it bids for your advertisers on other exchanges’ traffic, so their campaigns reach more than your own inventory.

Real-time bidding (RTB) in GoAdserver

Every request is auctioned in milliseconds. Bids are filtered by each campaign’s targeting and by the floor prices you set per country, ad type, device and connection, and each RTB campaign runs a first-price or second-price auction. Bid rules let one campaign bid differently under different conditions.

Targeting works as for any campaign: country and region, device, operating system, browser, language, connection, ISP, time of day, content category and retargeting audiences built from your own traffic.

SSP and RTB statistics show requests, bids, wins, win rate, earnings or spend and eCPM per partner, country and device, so you can see which partners actually pay.

Partners connect over OpenRTB 2.6, JSON or XML. Save each partner once as a connection profile with its protocol, currency, time zone and timeout, cap the queries per second you send, and check any endpoint with the built-in RTB endpoint tester.

To keep bad ads off your sites, publishers can have the landing pages of winning bids scanned by AdScanner, and the network can block the bid source behind a flagged page. Bot traffic and blocked domains are never offered to buyers.

Selling and buying with RTB in GoAdserver

Selling (SSP). Every demand partner gets its own feed with its own endpoint. Pause a feed and it stops answering at once. Choose which ad zones it may bid on, set floor prices, and see the earnings per partner.

Buying (DSP). An RTB campaign sends bid requests to an outside exchange’s endpoint with the ad size, auction type, RTB categories, an optional limit on queries per second and an optional bid ruleset. Spend and wins are reported per exchange, country and device.

How an RTB ad server handles one request

From the moment a page asks for an ad until the ad shows, it all happens in a fraction of a second:

  1. The ad zone asks for an ad. Bots and blocked domains are filtered out first, so they never reach a buyer.
  2. Your own campaigns compete. The ad server picks the best ad from your campaigns by targeting and price. See how ad selection works.
  3. Bidders get a bid request. On zones that use RTB, connected bidders receive a bid request with the chosen ad’s price as the floor, on top of the floor prices you set.
  4. The highest bid wins. A higher bid replaces your own ad; without one, your own ad serves.
  5. Everything is counted. Requests, bids, wins, response times and errors per partner show up in the RTB statistics and reports, so you see which bidder answers, wins and pays.

Zones with campaigns assigned to them directly, and direct deals, skip the auction, so placements you sold stay sold. Partners are set up as SSP campaigns, one feed per partner.

Test a partner before you go live

The RTB endpoint tester sends a test bid request to any partner endpoint or configured SSP campaign, with the ad type, size, domain, page URL and bid floor you choose, or with the partner’s own sample request. It reports one of four results with the response time: a valid bid, no bid (the endpoint is healthy but chose not to bid), an HTTP error, or a network error. A no-bid is normal; only the errors point to a real problem.

Who uses RTB

Ad networks that sell their remaining inventory to DSPs, publishers and ad managers who want more buyers competing for every impression, and companies that start their own white-label DSP. RTB runs alongside direct deals, run-of-network campaigns and SmartZones in GoAdserver’s ad management, and is part of every white-label ad network.

RTB products you can run

  • White-label RTB platform: the whole RTB business under your brand, from an RTB ad network to a pure programmatic company.
  • White-label ad exchange: take supply partners’ bid requests, auction them to your buyers and keep the margin you set.
  • White-label SSP: sell your publishers’ ad zones to outside DSPs and SSP networks.
  • White-label DSP: let your advertisers bid on other exchanges’ traffic with targeting and bid rules.
  • Header bidding: a Prebid Server compatible endpoint and a light one-call auction for publishers’ pages, AMP and apps.

Documentation

Set it up step by step in the GoAdserver documentation: the RTB integration reference and SSP campaigns.