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.