Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-38614970-20190223152313/@comment-31567784-20190303172235

May I add some infos in regards to the ad serving / ad selection process?

I can tell that the adserving process is 100% dynamic and there is no pre set sequence someone has programmed. We will never know upfront what ad/creative sequence we will see as it is an individual sequence the ad server maintains on it's own. You can guess it but to do so you will need an exact picture of the inventory and the avail campaigns with all the goals. We will not get access to this kind of data as long as we don't get access to the ad server used. ;-)

The ad server will make an ad selection in a split second process once he recieves a valid ad request. As soon as the request is in, the ad server will check the aviliable inventory and build a list of candidate ad campaigns and creatives based on targeting criterias that have been defined by the advertiser.

Things can be Geo location, time and day, user groups, behavioural data if avail or simply the amount of impressions left on the campaign in the given time frame/day/hour/minute. This process is usually running two times and the best creative for the individual requester is found. Keep in mind it only takes a small number of milliseconds to come to a result so you usually do not notice it.

The sequence of ads we see on a day is purly driven by this ad selection process, the availiable campaings for our region, a potential frequency cap and the amount of impressions to serve in the campaign duration. Usually the process is won by a creative that is behind schedule so it needs impressions to catch up on the plan. If no best ad can be found usually a house ad or barter ad will be displayed in case FM allows for such.

So if we see the banner "Sorry no ads avail" the ad selection gave no result in time and so we get nothing.

The process can get even more complcated if we take programatic ad buying into account where the advertisers can place a bid upon an ad request and the highest bid will win the selection. This can happen over multiple platforms to add even more layers. This is mostly used to monetize ad request where no premium content was found to get at least some income.

You can contacrt me if you like to get more details about dynamic ad serving.