Commentary

AppNexus Launches Headerbid Expert, A Chrome Browser Extension

Independent ad-tech provider AppNexus on Wednesday announced the launch of Headerbid Expert, a plug-in available via the Chrome Web Store. The company believes the product will help publishers confront common challenges associated with header bidding and access multiple demand sources directly and efficiently.

Header bidding allows publishers to achieve maximum monetization for their inventory by running auctions directly on the publisher’s page. Also known as “pre-bid,” the process offers an alternative to traditionally inefficient waterfall setups and Google’s DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers), to enable publishers to see and bid on every impression. Through header bidding, publishers can get direct access to all demand sources equally and determine what their inventory is truly worth.

“Our goal with Headerbid Expert is to help publishers maximize their overall yield,”  Tom Shields, SVP, publisher strategy, AppNexus, told Real-Time Daily. “They can dramatically increase their yield by doing header bidding. But there’s complexity associated with it. Headerbid Expert helps publishers truly maximize their yield without interrupting the user experience.”

Shields cited Drudge Report and style and entertainment site Livingly.com as publishers that do a lot of header bidding and suggested that Real-Time Daily download the app on Chrome to check out real-time header bidding activity on these sites.

Shields explained that header bidding calls out to each different bidder such as Amazon, Criteo or AppNexus to determine whether they have bids. At issue, publishers want this process to go quickly. Once all the bids come back, the ad server is called and the bids are passed along to optimize the overall yield. 

Using Headerbid Expert, Shields said AppNexus can see all the parties that are being called. Google’s Chrome has a developer mode where publishers can see all the calls being made to the various bidders, when they’re coming back and when the ad server is being called. “We can measure whether one bidder is taking a lot longer than the others.  If they’re taking too long, users aren’t getting a good experience. You have to measure these things,” he said.

To optimize user experience, publishers don’t want readers to have to wait for 10 seconds while an ad loads in a blank space. Users don’t see ads until all the calls are completed.

The strength of the tool is that it offers intelligence, debugging and the ability for publishers to truly understand what’s going on with their header bidding. “Our goals is, how do we make sure we’re giving publishers the tools to execute header bidding in a way that’s fair to all the bidders, maximizes publisher yield and doesn’t negatively impact user experience,” Shields said.

AppNexus aims to make header bidding an open and transparent process so that everyone can bid. Header bidding, Shields maintains, is the only way to get an open and transparent auction, which is why it’s taking off. However, publishers implement it in very different ways.

Shields added that the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab is also beginning to integrate and evaluate all the ways publishers and vendors do header bidding in an attempt to streamline the header bidding process “because it’s a mess right now.”

Reacting to AppNexus’ new tool, Andrew Casale, president and CEO of Index Exchange told Real-Time Daily via email: “I applaud anyone who drives more awareness and transparency into latency in the header, to highlight both the good-performing header tags, as well as the bad (for example, highly latent, sync versus asynchronous, etc). This is a very exciting technology, but not all platforms are built alike, and I think it’s important to shine a light on what’s really happening under the hood.”

2 comments about "AppNexus Launches Headerbid Expert, A Chrome Browser Extension".
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  1. Henry Blaufox from Dragon360, February 3, 2016 at 10:51 a.m.

    It doesn't help performance  and U|X if there are multiple header tags on the page. Clutter grinds down performance.

  2. Tobi Elkin from MediaPost, February 3, 2016 at 4:49 p.m.

    Henry, what do you suggest? I don't know that multiple header tags on a page can be helped.

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