Ad Servers - Publisher Ad Server

In our last post we discussed the early days of ad serving which had some challenges for the Publisher to manage their ads.  Making frequent changes to their production web server was not sustainable due to the risk and tediousness.  The solution to this was the Publisher Ad Server.

Publisher Ad Server

The Publisher Ad Server is another server set up to deliver the ads so that the production web server did not have to be changed for every single ad update required.  Certain areas of the web page that have inventory for ads can be replaced with code, typically called the ad tag, that will make a call to the Publisher Ad Server to deliver the right ad.  The Publisher Ad Server has the functionality to rotate through different ads and ensure the right number of impressions are served.

1. User in the browser goes to a Publisher's web site such as www.yahoo.com
2. The Publisher web server returns HTML to the browser to load the page and the ad tags
3. The web browser loads the ad tag which sends the browser to the Publisher's ad server to load the ad
4. The ad is delivered to the browser

The Publisher Ad Server has evolved in functionality over time to do more complex tasks including targeting ads to certain users, managing billing, reporting, management of ads, tuning and optimization of ads, and predicting available inventory (forecasting).  

Technology moves so quickly that I hesitate to provide examples of Publisher Ad Servers as these names may be defunct when you read this.  One of the most popular currently Google's DoubleClick for Publishers.

The Advertiser Challenge

Just like the Publisher had challenges with the original ad serving setup, the Advertiser experienced issues with the Publisher Ad Server.  For the Advertiser, every time they wanted to change or ad any new ads, they would have to send it directly to all the Publishers they are working with.  In addition, for reporting, not only do they need to aggregate across all the Publishers they are advertising with, but they also rely on the Publisher for reporting.  For any changes in their advertising strategy, the Advertiser also does not have control and would have to contact all the Publishers.

The solution to all these problems?  The Advertiser Ad Server is what we'll discuss in our next post.