What Is Header Bidding And How To Implement It

ppcguru April 27, 2024

Header bidding is a technology where publishers offer their ad inventory to many ad exchanges. Learn to automate it step by step.

What Is Header Bidding?

Header bidding is a technique where publishers offer their ad inventory to many ad exchanges, also called Supply-Side Platforms (or SSPs), simultaneously before making calls to their ad servers.

Here are the steps a publisher needs to pass to have this technology power up

Choose a consent management system.
Test and debug.

Applying To SSP Partners

There are hundreds of SSP partners available in the list to apply, but I would like to mention what I believe to be the most popular ones:

Apply to SSP partners and get approval.
Implement Prebid.JS on website.
Configure ad server.
Choose a consent management system.
Test and debug.

Applying To SSP Partners

There are hundreds of SSP partners available in the list to apply, but I would like to mention what I believe to be the most popular ones:

TripleLift.
Index Exchange.
Amazon UAM/TAM.
Xandr (formerly AppNexus).
Teads.
Pubmatic.
Sovrn.
Verizon.
Magnite (formerly Rubicon).
OpenX.
Sonobi.
GumGum.
Sharethrough.
Unurly.
How Does Prebid.js Work?

In nutshell, here is how Prebid.js works.

When a user opens a webpage, an ad request is made to all bidders (SSP partners).

Bidders respond with their CPM bids – let’s say $1 and $1.50 – and Prebid.js makes a request to the ad server, with the highest CPM targeting. In this case, that would be $1.50.
At the ad server, in our case, Google Ad Manager, the request is received and it knows that someone is paying $1.50 USD CPM for an ad. It runs another auction with Google Adsense or AdX.
If Google offers a higher CPM, then the Google Ad will be served.

If not, our ad with $1.50 CPM will win, and be served by our SSP partner.
With header bidding, bidders are able to compete and push CPMs (and therefore revenue) up.

There are two ways to implement header bidding:
- Client-side: When the auction runs via JavaScript in the browser.
- Server-side: When the auction is run on the server.
Let’s discuss client-side header bidding.

How To Implement Client-Side Header Bidding

In order to set up header bidding, we need to implement Prebid.js on our website and configure our Google Ad Manager (or ad server).
Debugging

For debugging, there are a few browser add-ons you can use to see if the auction runs without errors.

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