Everything you need to know about how real-time bidding exchanges work.

What are real-time bidding (RTB) ad exchanges?

An ad exchange is a technology platform that makes it easy for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell digital ad inventory, empowered by RTB (real-time bidding). It’s a digital marketplace where publishers can get the best price for their unsold ad inventory such as display, native and video ads—both for desktop and mobile and where advertisers can bid to purchase this inventory through a user-friendly interface.

Who uses ad exchanges?

Ad Exchanges can be of great value to both publishers as well as the advertisers thereby giving them an easy, cost-effective and efficient way to place and locate the display ad space.

Publishers (owners of adult sites, shops or blogs make their inventory available on an ad exchange and provide full details on the inventory such as ad zones, location, URL, rating, categories and more for advertisers to make their digital advertising space and impressions available to sell using our Supply-Side Platform (SSP) (more information about SSPs and what it is you can read here – We’ve Developed The First Adult SSP).

Benefits for publishers:

• Thousands of advertisers competing for your impressions.
• Setting minimum Cost Per Mille (CPM) for inventory units.
• It’s fire failover ads if it reaches a minimum CPM.
• Filtering and blocking ads with sensitive content or ads from competitors.
• More than 35% / 40% up revenues delivering your traffic to the highest bid.
• Connect another Supply-Side Platform (SSP) to request their pool of SSP’s to let them bid.

Advertisers and agencies can choose which ad impressions they want to buy, by plugging in into our Demand-Side Platform (DSP) (additional information explanation of DSP – EroAdvertising Demand-Side Platform for Media Buyers).

Benefits for advertisers:

• Have access to wide inventory from direct traffic sources and dozens of DSPs.
• We provide a complete system, with all data tracking capabilities.
• Match your statistics time zone to your Demand-Side Platform (DSP) network and all trackers.
• Have control of all activity going through your feeds.
• Check your statistics on a global scale or by publishers.
• Blacklist certain websites and audiences.
• Retarget across multiple Ad Exchanges.

How do Real-Time Bidding (RTB) ad exchanges actually work?

1. A user enters a publisher’s website or mobile app.
2. The user’s browser sends a request to the server to load an ad.
3. The ad server transfers the ad impression along with the collected data about the user to the ad exchange.
4. The ad exchange announces the available ad impressions and sends a bid request to all advertisers buying ad impressions through Demand-Side Platforms (DSP).
5. The advertisers evaluate the bid request and all information related to it (demographics, user ID, location, frequency capping, dayparting, and other targeting options).
6. The advertiser sends a reply to the ad exchange with a maximum bid amount.
7. The ad exchange analyses the bids on the impressions eliminate the advertisers who do not meet the publisher requirements and serves the winning bidder’s ad to the user.