About

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the kind words – to answer your question, I would look at some of the ad serving platforms out there and what kind of forecasting tools they offer. If they can serve mobile, they should be able to forecast on it as well. For a dedicated system outside your ad server, I would look to the usual suspects – Yieldex or Solbright (now owned by Operative). As long as they can pick up some kind of data feed from your ad server, they should be able to provide inventory management tools. Sadly, both are a bit of a commitment in terms of integration.

Hi Monty,

Most security issues that publishers cope with is related to malware spawning out of remnant or network ads, but typically you can manage security concerns with an active relationship with your network partners. I would suggest you gain a thorough understanding of what controls are in place with any partner you use to verify buyers and QA the ad tags and creative itself. Do they run credit checks on their buyers in advance? Do they have a team that loads the ad before passing the tag off to you? Are there any systems or bots in place to call the ad on a regular basis to ensure it loads and does not try to spawn an .exe file?

One thing I’ve learned that if a network asks you to not only serve, but host a very simple ad for a large company, that’s usually a red flag that something fishy is usually going on. If you are to serve a flash creative for a network, use a decompiler to look at the code and see if there are any pop ups (code will read target=’_blank’) and see if there is any reference to an .exe file. If so, I would not run the ad.

Hope this helps -

Hi Justin,

Sure – a passback is just another redirect that a 3rd party uses to pass an ad call back to the original ad server. For example, let’s say you were working with an ad network and had their 3rd party tag trafficked in your ad server. If you have enough inventory, your ad server would eventually call that tag, and request an ad from the ad network. But let’s also say that a condition of your relationship with the ad network is that the ad network will pay you at least $1.00 CPM for every impression they serve. If the ad network can’t fill that impression, they need a way to give it back to your ad server and let you serve another ad, perhaps to another ad network where you have a guaranteed rate of $.80 CPM. It sounds like a good way to go, but this daisy-chain of ad calls can significantly increase page load time and also tends to increase 3rd party discrepancies by a large margin. That’s because once you start using passback tags, you aren’t just 3rd party serving, you’re 5th, 7th, or 9th party serving, depending on how many parties are in your daisy chain. It’s the same problem that the ad exchanges and supply side platforms (SSPs) aim to solve.

The funny thing is though that supply side platforms still use passback tags with their ad network partners, though they tend to manage latency better than most publishers could. Certainly you should aim for a page load time under 4 seconds overall, and no more than 150 – 200ms at the most for the ad call itself. Best practice is more like 100 – 125ms.

So, while passbacks are a bit of a dirty word in the ad serving business, they are still quite ubiquitous and a heavy cost on business, despite what most digital media companies would have you believe.

Ben