White-Label Ad Exchange

An ad exchange sits between the two sides of programmatic advertising: supply partners send it their impressions, buyers bid on them, and the exchange keeps a margin on every impression it resells. GoAdserver gives you that exchange under your own brand, on your own domains, with your own campaigns as the fallback when no buyer bids.

Direct deals in GoAdserver

What a white-label ad exchange does

Each supply partner gets its own Exchange campaign: a feed with its own endpoint, settings and statistics. When a bid request arrives, GoAdserver passes it on to the buyers you allowed on that feed, runs the auction and answers the partner with the best bid. When no buyer bids, your own ad serves instead, so the request still earns. It is the same RTB ad server that runs SSP and DSP connections, packaged as one product you can sell.

Your margin, built into every bid

On an Exchange campaign you set the bid percentage you pass back to the supply partner; the rest is yours. An example with an 80% share: a buyer wins at 1.25, the partner is answered with 1.00, and 0.25 stays with you.

You also choose per feed which of your buyers may bid on it, so each supply partner reaches the demand that fits its traffic, and requests, bids, wins and revenue show per feed in the statistics.

The auction

Every connected buyer gets the request at the same time, and the answers are matched to the impression they bid on. Bids are converted to one currency, bids under the floor are dropped, and each feed runs a first-price auction (the winner pays its bid) or a second-price auction (the winner pays the next-highest bid plus 10%). Your own campaigns take part as well: a CPM campaign that beats the best outside bid by more than 10% keeps the impression. Win notices go out with the standard auction macros such as ${AUCTION_PRICE} filled in.

Connect any partner

  • Protocols: OpenRTB 2.6, plus JSON and XML feeds for partners that use them, and a JSON Bidder type. Partner-ready request and response examples per format are in the RTB integration reference.
  • Formats: banner, native, video (VAST), push, pop and pop-under, full-page interstitial, mail clicks and redirects; see all ad formats.
  • Billing notice: switch on billing on burl for partners that bill on their billing notice; the impression is then counted when that notice arrives, at the price the partner reports.
  • Endpoint tester: send a test bid request to any partner before you go live and see whether it returns a bid, a no-bid, an HTTP error or a network error.

Protection against slow and silent buyers

An exchange is only as fast as its slowest buyer. Each buyer has its own timeout, a buyer that keeps timing out is skipped for a while, and a buyer that keeps not bidding on a country, zone or visitor stops receiving those requests for ten minutes. You can also cap the queries per second each buyer receives. The Use Optimiser option on a feed blocks or lowers bids for sources inside that feed that underperform, by discrepancy rules you set.

Keep bad ads out

Bot traffic and blocked domains are never offered to buyers, and bids whose ad points to a blocked domain are rejected. With the Ad Scanner, the landing pages of winning bids are recorded and opened the way they were served, from the same country and on the same kind of device, so you can see where a buyer sends your partners’ visitors and block that bid source. How it works: scanning RTB landing pages and RTB ad quality.

Statistics per partner and per buyer

SSP statistics have separate tabs for Buying, Selling and Exchange, with requests, average bid floor, average response time, bids, wins, errors, timeouts, views, clicks and revenue, broken down by campaign, country, website, ad zone and network. A per-feed Stats API URL shows a partner its own figures and nothing else, so you don’t have to send spreadsheets. Your own buying side has its own RTB statistics.

Exchange, SSP, DSP or platform?

The same software runs every role, so you can start with one and add the others: sell inventory as a white-label SSP, buy for advertisers as a white-label DSP, take header bidding traffic from publishers’ pages, or run the whole white-label RTB platform with your own publishers and advertisers in a white-label ad network.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between an ad exchange and an SSP?

An SSP sells one publisher’s or network’s impressions to outside buyers. An exchange takes impressions from other supply partners and resells them to its buyers for a margin. In GoAdserver the first is a Selling campaign, the second an Exchange campaign.

Do I need my own buyers to start?

You need at least one buyer that bids; that can be an outside DSP or your own advertisers’ campaigns. When nobody bids, your own ad serves, so supply is never sent back empty when you have a matching campaign.

How do I earn on an exchange?

With the bid percentage on each Exchange campaign: the share of the winning bid you pass to the supply partner. The rest is your margin, and each feed’s revenue shows in the statistics.

Which protocols do partners need?

OpenRTB 2.6 is the default. Partners that use simpler JSON or XML feeds, common for pop, push and mail-click traffic, can connect with those.

Is it really under my brand?

Yes. Partners and buyers see your domains, your panel and your company name; GoAdserver is the technology underneath.

Documentation

Set it up step by step: SSP campaigns: buying, selling and exchange, the RTB integration reference for your partners, and RTB statistics.

Want to see it with your own partners? Talk with our team or compare the plans.