Header bidding wrapper: approaches for publishers.

Header bidding is the technology to tune advertisements on publisher’s sites. This is a programmatic type of advertising based on auction bidding. Ads from various providers compete for site’s ad spots by offering the highest price. The main idea is that site body uploads in the browser only after the winner is detected. This means decreased page loading time in comparison with other online advertising methods. For instance, javascript code usage.

Obviously, this is advantageous for site owner. The method provides a positive user experience. Also header bidding boosts publishers’ revenues even by 30%-40%.

Along with the benefits above, the idea of header bidding was to provide transparency in the entire internet advertising. Buyers know exactly what they compete for. Publishers aware of who and at what price buy their ad inventory. In other words, both sides have control on their strategies.

These benefits sound cool. They supposed to be pretty attractive to the industry. But why does only small percentage of sites use it? After all, technology appeared several years ago.

Reality shows, that to implement header bidding on site is a quite complicated task. Especially for those, who are not a pro in programming. Setup documentation is always available on open sourced prebid.js homepage. A site owner needs to obtail sertain coding skills and knowledge to set up header bidding from scratch.

Approaches to implement header bidding wrapper on site:

That being said, there are several ways to handle the scope:

1. to hire programmers for these tasks (good for publisher houses). Header bidding coding job is not a routine tasks flow. Updates and revisions of prebid and other setups should be released upon they appear. Anyway, it requires extra budgets.

2. to learn by yourself. The other way. For those, who want to dive into development work deeper. This option costs no money, but consumes valuable time. Site owner can spend it for content creation, generating and planning monetization strategy instead.

3. to find an ad hoc solution for managing such tasks. Such approach will allow the owner to keep the focus and continue developing and promoting web resource.

Ultimately, a good header bidding solution should be able not only to create a wrapper for the site. Also, additional features that simplify further usage of technology matter. For instance, end-to-end reporting UI, custom tools for yield management, responsive tech support are essential. At last, it should have embeded integrations with 3rd party ecosystem providers like GAM, user identity tools, as well as non-prebid based solutions and others.

Publishers definitely should think about it when choose their header bidding technology service provider.