Role Of Ad Servers In Online Advertising

Ad servers are servers that store advertisements and serve them to web pages.

Ad servers can be local, run by a publisher to serve adverts to websites on the

publisher’s domain, or they can be third-party ad servers, which serve adverts

to web pages on any domain. Ad servers facilitate advert trafficking and provide

reports on advert performance.

The benefits of ad servers:

Rather than distribute copies of each piece of creative advertising to each

publisher or media buyer, you can send out a line of code that calls up an

advertisement directly from the ad server each time an advert is scheduled to

run. The agency loads the creative to the server once and can modify rotations

or add new units on the fly without needing to re-contact the vendors. This is

referred to as third-party ad serving.

The ad servers provide a wealth of data, including impressions served, adverts

clicked, CTR and CPC. Whilst publishers have their own ad servers, most of

the third-party ad servers also have the ability to provide performance against

post-click activities such as sales, leads, downloads, or any other site-based

action the advertiser may want to measure. Ad servers provide a consistent counting methodology across the entire

campaign enabling the advertiser to gain an “apples to apples” comparison

of performance across the entire media schedule, which includes multiple

websites. This ensures the advertiser gets what they are paying for, and avoids

fraudulent activities, like click-fraud, as a good third-party ad server should

be audited.

The ad server also allows sophisticated targeting of display advertising.

Examples of third-party ad servers include Double Click, Atlas and Media Mind.