In early 1990’s companies, organizations started creating their first websites on the internet. To showcase business services and products on website to offer online visitor a complete insight of their business. In meanwhile, the advertisers spotted the potential of online display advertising on the website design Dubai to offer display Ads to an online visitor.
This is how the concept of Ad Server (Advertising Server) was born. The Ad server’s main purpose was to allows online publishers (owners of websites, blogs, pages) to manage advertising on a website quickly and easily without modifying the code of the website and track the performance of the Ads published.
The first central Ad server was built by FocaLink aka FocaLink Communications Inc. in 1995 to advertise and market on world wide web for online media buying, planning internet campaign placement and placement analysis.
Features & Functionalities of Ad Server
Ad servers are software that measure advertising performance and deal with:
Serving Online Advertising
The ad server sends an ad from the server to the end user, defining the targets to be reached and the spaces on the sites to be used, or the placements of an ad;
Track Metrics
It takes care of tracking and counting impressions, clicks and interactions generated after the conversions of online advertising on the Advertiser’s site.
They are also divided into:
Ad server for Advertisers: also called buy-side.
This type concerns those who buy advertising space directly or through Social Media Agency or Media Center;
Ad server for Publishers: called sell-side.
This type concerns those who sell the advertising space hosting the advertiser’s ads, directly or through an online Dealer or an Ad Network that collects the spaces of multiple websites.
An ad server is used by: media centers, publishers, creative agencies that create traditional banners.
Benefits of Ad Server vs Manual Management
One of the main benefits that can be obtained using an Ad Server is not having to modify the code of your site from time to time to change the advertising inserted (it is a very convenient tool for example by all the people who work online with multiple affiliations and networks ).
In practice, an Ad Server is a server that allows you to manage advertising in a more professional way:once you have created the “campaigns” within your Ad Server (that is, once you have reported the codes of the various campaigns you use), after setting the spaces available for advertising on your site (you will have to enter the spaces where you want advertising the code of your Ad Server), you will be able to manage in complete autonomy all the ads displayed by the site through the Ad Server which will also allow you to have very advanced reporting (depending on your needs): number of impressions received, number of clicks received, target users and many other information.
There are also some Ad Servers that allow you to optimize and improve the performance, in economic terms, of your site. Do you want to earn more? I read that an Ad Server is already online that allows you to display advertisements (after a testing period, in which clicks and statistics are analyzed) that have a higher CPM (Cost per Mill impression, or cost per thousand impressions) ( increasing your earnings accordingly).
Advantages of Ad Server in a nutshell
Single control panel:
You will no longer have to connect to many networks to collect the codes and then insert them on your website: once you have entered the codes in the Ad Server and after having entered the Ad Server code on your site or blog you just have to choose from the Ad Server control panel which advertisements to display, for how long (or perhaps for how many impressions) and where;
Changing the campaigns displayed quickly:
You will not have to search (if you are a blogger) the article in which you have inserted that particular advertisement that is now no longer available (unless you have entered it manually), just enter the Ad Server and edit that campaign (or deactivate it);
Advanced reporting
You will have your own data (perhaps to be compared with the data provided by the various affiliate networks or pay per click networks) on the clicks received, the impressions, and the statistics / performance of your site!
An Ad Server is also very convenient for those who already work with some customers directly: in fact, if you have people who have purchased spaces on your site or blog, the ad server will be useful for setting the campaign viewing period ( or the maximum number of impressions), the positioning of the campaign and all the data agreed with the customer.
Did you already know Ad Servers? Do you use them? Do you want to add some information to this article? Leave us a comment!
