Ad Serving
Technology for managing the delivery of advertising into a website and measuring the number of ads delivered (impressions) and clickthrus achieved. Ad serving can be used by publishers to manage inventory and by advertisers to manage online advertising campaigns.
For a website, the ad server needs to look through all the ads available to serve to a user who is on a particular page, and choose the appropriate ad to display, abiding by the rules that the web site and advertiser have agreed upon in advance (and were accordingly programmed into the ad server).
For example, if a web site has 10 different advertisers that have paid for a big square ad on a particular page, the ad server must decide which one to serve (or display) at any given moment. There are many different scenarios that may come into play for an ad server to determine which ad to display, and what follows are some examples. One advertiser may have only agreed to pay for ads from 9am - 5pm (time of day targeting). If it is after 5pm, then the ad server should not serve that one. Or, another advertiser may only have paid to show one ad to each user per day (a frequency cap). The ad server must therefore see if a user has seen that ad before, on that day and not serve it again if the user has seen it. In another scenario, an advertiser may have agreed to pay a premium rate, but only if the person who sees the ad is in the United States (geo targeting). In that case, the ad server needs to determine if the user is in fact within the U.S. and serve the appropriate ad.
