Have you ever heard the quote “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself”?
Over the last decade the tech and marketing jargon has managed to reach the state of gibberish where you feel you’re probably reading a sentence, but there’s no way of telling if it is so.
Here’s a simple guide on how to choose a technology for your digital ad network without confusing the life out of you.
1. Evaluate your strategy towards potential publishers & advertisers
What this means is the technology you eventually choose for your ad network should help you to attract, engage and ultimately build long-lasting productive relationships with both publishers and advertisers.
First and foremost, that means your network should offer great terms of payout and will be ease of use.
You know exactly what your publishers and advertisers expect from your ad network, make sure you can fix at least a portion of their ad-related problems by choosing the right tech for building your network.
2. Check out the competition
You can start by researching the 2019 top 10 lists of “Best Ad Network For Publishers and Advertisers”.
This alone will help you clearly identify the kind of technology you need.
Just for reference, there are ad networks famous for their strict approval guidelines, some are known for offering the contextual ads of CPA, CPM, and CPC programs, there are those that have instant approval, quick payments or monetize search traffic.
Figure out where your ad network is going to land and find tech that will help you achieve your goals.
3. Look for a reliable ad management platform
One of the most important things here is not to confuse the immensely helpful “look for”, with the never even mentioned, “build your own”.
People way too often grossly underestimate the amount of work, manpower, and effort that goes into building a reliable, scalable platform with strong predictive optimization, integration with all major supply, etc.
A great already build ad server will help you effectively manage ads, replaced them, test constantly for improvement, effectively track displays, clicks, generate reports for your clients and much more.
A lot of ad servers offer free trial periods, so take advantage and test them out.
You can start with the hosted DFP, adColt, AdButtler or the OpenX or the self-hosted OIOPublisher.
4. Identify your top five priorities
To narrow your search, write down the top 5 of your non-negotiables for tech and make sure your tech supplier checks every box.
For example, your top 5 can be: reliable programmatic monetization sources, advanced (constantly modernized) and secure platform, most of the ad formats available, exact forecasting with detailed effectiveness analysis and, last but not least, the preferably affordable option to white-label the interface and customize tags and URLs.
One of the to hit all five (and some) with the Admixer.
For the last five years, they’ve helped clients who use their SaaS technology to become immensely creative, and highly interactive with the ads, boost targeting abilities and data management, offer clients precise timely reports and analytics.
Moreover, their intuitive interface is something astonishing. It even allows paying right from the interface. You can check them out at https://admixer.net/adnetwork.
5. Visualize your network in detail
Building a network is not an easy task by any means; it’s hard work with way too many moving parts.
The best advice here – choose a few of the companies that met all of your Top 5 checklist and talk to their customer support.
Chances are, half of your mind boggling questions will vanish within minutes.
Professional customer rep will help you to understand what type of the ad network will work specifically for you, examine the kind of publishers/advertisers you’re planning to work with, choose between Premium or Vertical networks, understand if it is better for you to focus on a certain type of inventory or just work with all types simultaneously.
6. Choose the tech provider that changes with the industry
In our day and age the tech industry is changing with a blink of an eye.
If your tech provider hasn’t come out with anything new or offered an upgrade in a month or so, time to look for a new one.
If your tech partner is constantly changing and following the current trends, that means they are able to offer you the best cutting-edge tech solutions for your business and keep you moving forward.
For example, the products of Admixer’s programmatic ecosystem are constantly bettered and improved to benefit your ad network.
Their AdExchange will aid with the netting of monetized impressions, TradeDesk is suitable for direct deals or the inventory transfer for the purchase or adding to the TOP Packages at Marketplace.
Creatives with the absolutely superb formats creation and more than 50 professionally designed standard templates.
They offer a great program for data collection and much more.
The latest one to love is the ads.txt which essentially is a text file with a list of authorized digital sellers.
It is used by Publishers to define trusted partners who have permission to sell their inventory.
Furthermore, it helps to enable potential media buyers to verify ad sellers and to be sure that they will spend their money on a high-quality impression.
