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How to Use Header Bidding

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how to use header bidding

Despite the technology involved in the adtech space, there are still many inefficiencies and unfair practices that need to be ironed out. Header bidding is a solution that brings publishers and advertisers together.

What Is Header Bidding?

Header bidding is a process where many advertisers simultaneously bid (in real-time) in a digital auction to win ad space on your website. This auction occurs outside your primary ad server every time your pages load or whenever an ad unit refreshes.

how header bidding works

For publishers, the primary advantage is it helps ensure you get the best deals on your ad space. To do this, you must ensure that you reach out to supply-side platforms (SSPs) and other demand partners to ensure you have many advertisers to bid on your inventory.

Header bidding is a more refined way of auctioning off your ad inventory. While it may be a bit more complex to implement than traditional methods (like waterfall bidding), it has many advantages that make it worth the hassle.

How Header Bidding Works

Here’s how the whole process play out when a visitor lands on a publisher’s page:

  • A visitor clicks a link that takes them to a web page
  • As the page loads, the short string of JavaScript in the page’s header makes a call to your demand partners or ad networks
  • Each demand partner places a bid on the publisher’s ad inventory
  • The winning bid is directed to the publisher’s ad server
  • The publisher’s ad server then connects the user to the advertiser’s server and displays the winning ad

The process may involve several steps, but it takes less than a second from start to finish.

Header Bidding Vs. Waterfall Bidding

One of the most popular methods of buying and selling ad space was waterfall bidding. It has worked pretty well for the past few years, and some publishers are still reluctant to move away from it to embrace header bidding.

The question, however, is which is better: header bidding or waterfall bidding?

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To properly understand why it is your better option, we need to briefly look at what waterfall bidding is and its pros and cons.

What Is Waterfall Bidding, and How Does It Work?

Waterfall bidding is one of the earliest forms of programmatic bidding.

Waterfall bidding is an old-school way of ad serving in which publishers set a floor price for their ad space. The publisher sets the priority for each advertiser or ad network they’re connected to.

When selling ad impressions using the waterfall bidding process, inventory is offered to advertisers at a fixed minimum price per impression. The first ad network to bid at that price gets the slot.

Another important aspect of waterfall bidding is that the bidders don’t get to bid randomly. Networks that rank higher, thanks to higher historical yield, get dibs on bidding.

In a sense, waterfall bidding isn’t accurate bidding at all.

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The most significant disadvantage of waterfall bidding is that the price you sell your inventory at doesn’t necessarily reflect its true value.

Ad space that remains unsold is passed on to the next ad exchange, determined by size, not the amount of the bid. The process goes on until the inventory is sold. It’s from this cascading nature of passing down inventory that the waterfall method gets its name.

Unfortunately for publishers, this means if the runner-up advertiser was willing to pay more, the publisher misses out on getting more revenue.

9 Reasons You Should Use Header Bidding

You’ve probably noticed a few advantages that header bidding has (for both publishers and advertisers) over other methods of auctioning off ad space.

Some of these benefits include:

1. Header Building Gives Publishers Access to More Advertisers

For publishers, a significant advantage of header bidding is it allows you to expand and diversify the advertisers on your site. It ensures that you’re not reliant on a small set of advertisers. Doing so helps increase your business’ resilience and adaptability.

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2. Fair Bidding

One of the biggest advantages for advertisers is that it levels the playing field. That’s because no advertiser has an advantage. All bids are placed fairly, and the highest bidder wins, no matter who they are (and even if they use AdEx).

3. Header Building Improves Auction Efficiency

This type of bidding utilizes real-time pricing instead of the historical pricing used by other ad auction models. This makes it faster and more efficient.

4. Header Bidding Gives You More Control

For publishers, one of the main advantages is it gives you more control over the sources that can participate in the bidding process. As a publisher, you retain control over your site.

5. Increased Revenue

Another reason publishers like header bidding is the increased ad revenue. Not only can you charge more for your premium inventory, but you are also assured that the highest bidder wins every time.

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6. Improved Ad Quality

Thanks to the increased competition, advertisers work hard to ensure their ads are high quality and more relevant to a publisher’s audience. Improved ad quality helps ensure a better user experience (UX.)

7. Improved Yield

With header bidding, you rely less on a single supply-side platform. As a result, your overall yield increases due to smarter allocation of impressions and increased fill rate.

8. Increased Fill Rates

One main reason you should use header bidding is that it exposes you to more advertisers. This has the huge advantage of increasing the chances of publishers filling all their ad slots.

9. Better Transparency

Advertisers enjoy the improved transparency that header bidding affords. They have access to all the publisher’s inventory, and thus know what’s available and how much it can cost them. This transparency helps advertisers make informed bidding decisions.

Header bidding has so many advantages for both publishers and advertisers, it’s undoubtedly worth the effort to implement it.

What Are the Drawbacks of Header Bidding?

While this type of bidding might seem like the perfect solution for both advertisers and publishers to maximize their returns, it does have its drawbacks. Here are the main ones:

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Increased Latency

To run header bidding, publishers have to add a script to their site, which can slow down page load speed, resulting in a poor user experience. Another caveat is that the more advertisers that bid on your inventory, the more the page latency is affected.

You can mitigate these by following website optimization best practices to ensure your pages load faster.

Increased Management Overheads

Once you’ve set up header bidding, it requires close management to ensure it performs well. Besides ensuring that your code is working well for all your partners, adjusting bids, timeouts, and several other tasks are required to keep your header bidding optimized.

Infrastructure Costs

Implementing this bidding style can lead to increased infrastructure costs for SSPs and demand-side platforms (DSPs). One reason for this is the increased load on their servers. Another reason is the required tools and personnel needed to run it.

Header bidding may have its drawbacks, but overall, the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

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How to Implement Header Bidding

Implementing header bidding for publishers can be a complicated process. Setting it up is tedious as it may require you to develop countless line items of ad inventory. As said, this can have an impact on your page load speed. The consequences are poor UX for both advertisers and website visitors.

Thankfully, there are a couple of solutions for that: wrappers and server-side.

Header Bidding Wrappers

Header bidding wrappers are code containers that help ensure all auctions start simultaneously and end on time. Wrappers also ensure ads load asynchronously. This means the page’s content can load before the ads, ensuring your website latency doesn’t impact visitors

Server-Side Header Bidding

Another solution is to implement server-side header bidding.

Traditional header bidding takes place client-side (also called browser-side), meaning it depends on the browser to handle individual networks’ requests. Of course, this can put a strain on resources; something header wrappers can help address.

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If many networks access the header wrapper, it triggers several JavaScript processes that make site load speed suffer.

One way to solve that problem is to limit the number of advertisers that can bid for your inventory. However, that defeats the purpose of header bidding, as you want as many advertisers as possible to participate.

Server-side header building is a solution to this problem. Server-side header bidding takes the bidding process off your browser and moves it to an external server.

To do this, you must embed code on the back-end of your website. This way, all the heavy work is transferred from your browser to your ad server. As a result, your browser can focus on the one thing it’s meant to do: serve your website visitors with content.

One of the most significant advantages of server-side is that it helps improve page load times. It also helps ensure a more efficient bidding process.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a publisher or advertiser, you should consider a header bidding strategy.

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For advertisers, header bidding levels the playing field by allowing everyone to bid fairly, no matter the ad network’s size.

Publishers ensure their ad inventory sells for what it’s worth. Your primary task is to drive traffic to your website and let the bidding code do the heavy lifting of monetizing your website. With header bidding, you won’t leave money on the table, which is a win-win for everyone involved.

If you need help implementing a header bidding strategy (or even a holistic campaign that incorporates other digital ad strategies), let our agency know. Our team of experts can help!

Have you tried header bidding as a publisher or advertiser?

What was your experience with it?

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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