What an ad server does
- Stores campaigns: the creative, dates, budget and number of impressions sold
- Targets: matches campaigns to audience, content, device, region and time
- Decides: picks the best ad for each request according to priority and price
- Paces: spreads a campaign's impressions across its dates
- Caps frequency: limits how often one viewer sees one ad
- Counts: impressions, quartiles, completions and clicks
- Reports: delivery for advertisers and revenue for the publisher
How a request is handled
A request arrives describing the opportunity. The ad server first looks for a directly sold campaign that matches. If none qualifies, or if an auction might pay more, it offers the slot to programmatic demand through one or more supply-side platforms. The winner is returned as a VAST response.
Ad server, SSP and DSP
Several products combine an ad server and an SSP. A small service may start with a single ad network that performs all of these roles and add its own ad server once it sells advertising directly.
- Ad server: the publisher's own decision and delivery system
- SSP (supply-side platform): sells the publisher's unsold inventory to many buyers by auction
- DSP (demand-side platform): the advertiser's tool for bidding on inventory across many publishers
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