Header Bidding: The Trendy Programmatic Technique

Most digital advertisers have been familiar with programmatic selling for a while but may just now be hearing of header bidding. As the newest trend in programmatic, header bidding has the potential to help both advertisers and publishers.

According to Digiday, header bidding is a technique which allows for multiple bids on the same inventory. This increases the yield for publishers and provides more data points for advertisers.

According to Technorati CEO, Shanie Higgins, “the entire idea of this system is to eliminate the need for pushing inventory back and forth, which is inefficient and wasteful”. While header bidding does help to streamline the programmatic process, it comes with a significant drawback.

By adding yet another SSP tag to their page, a publisher risks raising their page load times. Page latency has helped fuel the popularity of ad blockers in recent years.

While the header bidding technique is not perfect, publishers greatly benefit from the increased transparency and revenue. With programmatic ad spend estimated to reach $37.9 billion by 2018, the chance of more revenue is worth the risk and inconvenience for many publishers.

In response to the recent popularity of header bidding, Google has released exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation for publisher testing. According to The Programmatic Publisher, Facebook’s Audience Network has also integrated with tech partners for header bidding.