There has been so much written about header bidding and client-side auctions in the past few years that most of the programmatic buyers are pretty well versed with how it functions, the benefits and challenges it poses. Not much is written about the server-side auction until Google came with Open Bidding (formerly Exchange Bidding Dynamic Auction/EBDA) that offers unified auction via server-side bidding. During the course of second-half last year, Chocolate took a major step by creating a Supply-Side Platform, Chocolate Premium, that offers 100% server-side auctions. Since then, we have on-boarded 110+ premium publishers with 11B+ monthly ad requests and became one of the early video-only partners on Google’s Open Bidding platform. In our conversations with demand partners willing to partner with Chocolate, we often come across questions around server-side bidding mechanism, here are few pointers that our current demand partners find useful and might give you a clearer picture on server-side bidding mechanism:
Viewability Measurement
Viewability measurement is table stakes when it comes to programmatic advertising nowadays. Buyers expect 100% viewability measurement on all the inventory purchased, which is what you get with Chocolate Premium. 100% Viewability measurement along with IAB’s Open Measurement (OM) SDK compliance.
Reduced Latency
The key advantage of moving bidding mechanism server-side is reduced page load and ad load times. For video ads, latency is a major issue and programmatic buyers have been trying to find a way around client-side bidding which puts a lot of load time on the web pages as all bidding happens on the browser. With server-side bidding, the entire auction mechanism is done on a server and has no implications on the user’s browser or web/app page. 86% of video impressions delivered on Chocolate Premium in Feb’2020 had latency < 200 ms.
Bid Enrichment
Enriched bid requests are a boon to the programmatic buying process. Every bid request on the Chocolate Premium platform is loaded with an estimated viewability score, estimated video completion rate, minimum bid to win metric, and in-depth geo data as basic attributes. With such a rich data set, buyers can now make better-informed decisions and bid intelligently.
High-Quality Inventory
With strict adherence to IAB’s anti-fraud initiatives like ads.txt, sellers.json and SupplyChain Object, Chocolate Premium, works with publishers only after carefully scanning & verifying all details. 100% of the inventory on our platform is ads.txt/app-ads.txt compliant. We maintain an updated sellers.json page enabling complete transparency to our buyers. OpenRTB SupplyChain Object with payment Id is implemented across our entire platform. All these efforts have brought premium publishers like CBS, EA, DailyMail, NDTV, Outfit7, Minute Media selling video inventory on our platform.
