What is Header Bidding and how it works?

How Header Bidding works

Key points of Header Bidding programmatic solution

Header Bidding high revenue
Revenue is higher.
The average uplift is at 10-30%, you get highest bids for any ad inventory and increase your overall yield.
Header Bidding access to demand
Access to demand.
Directly integrated world's major ad buyers sees your ad inventory and bid on each impression at the same time, publisher holds auction, publisher decides who will bid on it’s inventory.
Header Bidding easy copy/paste integration
Easy copy/paste integration.
Put few lines of code into your website's header and take all the profits from this integration which is also compatible with traditional 'waterfall' solution.
Header Bidding minimal latency
Minimal latency.
Content of your website delivers before advertisement, decreasing latency, bringing better user experience and trust to your website. Header Bidding wrapper loads asynchronously, performs auction in the background. Publisher collect all the ad data and builds own advertisement strategy smarter, based on live numbers.

Header Bidding explained — FAQ and guide

What is Header Bidding and why you should use it?

Header bidding is a technology designed to give publishers to gain more control over their ad inventory. It allows to run a realtime auction on publisher’s side decreasing page latency and maximizing the CPM rate for Each impression.

Every time page is loaded the script in the header sends out the requests to all your ad partners simultaneously, receives the bids for each ad place and displays the ad with the highest price. All in under 1 second. This is a major improvement on the traditional waterfall ad serving model when the impression is passed from one ad partner to the other causing the page to load as long as takes for the request to reach the end of the daisy chain.

Switching to header bidding ad serving shows the increase in CPM by at least 30% and up to 200%! And it is quite obvious since all the Ad providers have an opportunity to bid on the same ad impression therefore they all have to compete with each other to win. If no bids were returned the in-house ad is displayed or standard waterfall setup is initiated.

In short, you get the benefits of increased CPM from true bid auction and low latency. And it does not affect any of your traditional ad setup. You can run both header bidding and traditional waterfall ad serving setup on the same page.

How do I put it on my site?

First, you will need the header bidding container. It is a core script that sends out requests and collects the bids. There are several containers out there, but the one which really stands out as the best solution is Prebid.js. It is an open source, free of charge, and has the widest range of supported bidders.

After that you choose the header bidding partners you wish to use. You should have at least 2-3 bidders to provide enough competition. In order to add a bidder you need to have its prebid.js adapter included in your container (Prebid.js).

And finally, after short test period (to optimize the timeout and price increment) you are good to go live and witness the revenue goes up.

How can I implement it without programming skills?

Integrating header bidding is certainly not really hard, but also is not so easy if your skills in HTML coding are not perfect.

But it is worth the trouble. And we are here to provide you our support. All you need is the basic web development experience which you already have since you have been running the website.

The rest of the heavy lifting can be done by our dev team for you.