Features of a typical Ad-server

Online campaigns revolved around ad-servers. As explained earlier, there can be 2 – 3 ad-servers in a given campaign. The ad-server market is quite a big market in itself. Google with its acquisition of Doubleclick in 2008, now has over 50 % of the ad-server market. Following google, is yahoo with a ridiculously low share of around 10%!

To the uninitiated, the ad-server is a kind of a black box. Beyond the general ‘An ad-server is used to serve ads in online campaigns’, there is little which the layman knows.

Let me, in simple terms. Try to unravel the ad-server mystery.

When one speaks of ad-servers one speaks of the following features –

General Features

Administration Features

Advertiser Features

Publisher Features

Reporting Features

Application Program Interface (API) Features

Let me briefly discuss each of these features

General Features

General features usually covers features and functionalities that are usually available in the average ad-server. It covers –

Installation rules , whether it allows white label licensing etc

Whether things like content based ad-matching are available or not

Indexing engine and how it works and its capacity – how many pages can be processed in a day per server

How easily customizable is the ad-server

Kind of customer login features available

How scalable the platform is and how many impressions it can handle in a single server and multi-server installation

Architectural Scalability

Administration Features

Administration features have to do how an ad-server can help run and manage a campaign from an administration perspective. Areas covered here are –

Kind of interface = web based , or does it require a special software to manage the system

Configuration options

How easy is maintenance of campaigns

Monitoring and monitoring reports

Advertiser search features – can we search advertiser by name, email id, company name?

Advertiser account management – kind of tools available

How easily can ads be suspended?

Management of Account Information

How can payments be accepted – credit card, payments

Posting accountwise credits and debits

Publisher search features – can we search advertiser by name, email id, company name?

Approve / Decline / Suspend accounts
Post credits for bonuses
Payment options

Server Status Report - summary of the health of the ad server.
Daily Performance Reports
Advertiser Performance Reports

Advertiser Features

These are features that the advertiser can use to suit his needs. Covered in this are –

Does the ad-server permit account pre-funding to start a campaign

Does it have a web-based interface allowing for self-management

Does it support quick ad self-creation?

Types of targeting it supports – via content channels, geographical targeting, regional targeting, keyword/phrase targeting

Is a budget capping tool available?

Support for start and stop dates for campaign

Does it support on demand campaign pauses?

Does it email notify low account /exhausted funding on a campaign?

Support for Automatic funding

Does it support pay-pal as a means of payment?

Does it allow CSV downloads of reports?

Publisher Features

These features cater to a publisher and his view of a campaign. Covered in this are –

Availability of web interface

Does it support ad matching to page content ? i.e does it have a contextual engine?

Does it generate a revenue summary report by date?

Does it generate CTR and earnings generated in a date range?

Ability to change account profile and password information.

Reporting Features

This is quite self-explanatory. It deals with the kind of reports the systems generates.

Security Features

What kind of security features does the ad-server support?

Does it help defend against click fraud?

Does it have an inbuilt invalid click detection logic?

Does it provide for automatic account locking after ‘x’ number of tries?

What kind of password functionalities does it support?

Application Programming Interface (API) Features

APIs are ‘pipes’ that an ad-server has to permit users to extract data from the ad-sever. Such extraction is usually done to generate reports, have a customized view of a campaign etc.

Different users of an ad-server will look for APIs to achieve differing purposes, primarily in the area of report generation.

I have tried to keep this article as simple as possible so that the average reader can understand in broad and general terms what features and functionalities one expects from an ad-server. For further reading, I would suggest visiting websites of ad-servers like Double click, Adsense etc and see how they stack up against these feature requirements.