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Central ad server |
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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008) |
Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns.
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An ad server is a computer server, specifically a web server, that stores advertisements used in online marketing and delivers them to website visitors.
The content of the webserver is constantly updated so that the website or webpage on which the ads are displayed contains new advertisements -- e.g., banners (static images/animations) or text -- when the site or page is visited or refreshed by a user.
In addition, the adserver also performs various other tasks like counting the number of impressions/clicks for an ad campaign and report generation, which helps in determining the ROI for an advertiser on a particular website.
As adservers consume bandwidth and add to the a page's size and weight this can sometimes lead to them affecting the users experience of the website. On low bandwidth connections such as dial-up this can be considerable. To that end programs and extensions (see AdBlock) have arisen that ignore requests to these adservers and so present the site to the user without an ads attached.
Ad servers come in two flavors: local ad servers and third-party or remote ad servers. Local ad servers are typically run by a single publisher and serve ads to that publisher's domains, allowing fine-grained creative, formatting, and content control by that publisher. Remote ad servers can serve ads across domains owned by multiple publishers. They deliver the ads from one central source so that advertisers and publishers can track the distribution of their online advertisements, and have one location for controlling the rotation and distribution of their advertisements across the web.
The local ad server was first developed and introduced by NetGravity in January 19961 for delivering online advertising at major publishing sites such as Yahoo and Pathfinder. The company was founded by Tom Shields and John Danner, and based in San Mateo, California. In 1998, the company went public on NASDAQ (NETG), and was purchased by DoubleClick in 1999. The Netgravity adserver was renamed to Doubleclick Enterprise, current production release is v6.5.
The remote ad server was first developed and introduced by FocaLink Media Services in February 19962 for controlling online advertising or banner ads. The company was founded by Dave Zinman and Jason Strober, and based in Palo Alto, California. In 1998, the company changed its name to AdKnowledge, and was purchased by CMGI in 1999.
The typical common functionality of ad servers includes:
Advanced functionality may include:
One aspect of ad serving technology is automated and semi-automated means of optimizing bid prices, placement, targeting, or other characteristics. Significant methods include:
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