What is Ad-serving technology and how does it work?

Have you ever wondered how ad-serving technology works? Have you wondered how an ad is served? And how it is tailored to make it as relevant to users as possible?

Why do many companies use 3^rd party servers?

Let me run through some of these aspects by using the example of a non-existent newspaper – The England Journal (EJ). Unlike the ad on the actual newspaper where the ad remains constant, the ad on the online version of the newspaper keeps changing – first it is an ad for the Marriot chain of hotels and then you have an ad for Britain as a tourist attraction.

Which ad appears on a page is determined by a number of factors, like who is the advertiser and what is the content on the page. Is there a clash between the content on the page and ad ? Is there a synergy?

Suppose the a weightloss company – Weightloss UK- wants to advertise on the EJ. The EJ will have to build ad-serving technology to determine when it display Weightloos’ ads and to whom and Weightloss will have to determine which ads were show and when they were shown.

That’s why publishers like the EJ and advertisers outsource this to 3^rd party companies call Ad-serving companies. These ad-serving companies serve ads on their behalf. Outsourcing ad-serving allows publishers to focus on their core competencies – stick to their knitting as it were. Advertisers are also allowed to stick to their core competencies- writing ads that hit their audience between their eyes as it were.

Ad-serving technology serves ads on their behalf. It also helps the advertiser and publisher alike to better manage their campaigns.

It helps the publisher helps see and measure performance of different advertisers on their website. It helps the publisher manage his inventory and also generate reports as and when required. The advertiser, on the other hand, can track performance of ads on different sites, allowing him to generate reports as well.

In the second part of this report I’ll dwell on popular ad-serving technologies available in the marketplace.