Real-time bidding stands for the buying and selling the online ad impressions via online auctions that are held in the time it takes a webpage to load. Such auctions often occur on ad exchanges and specific supply-side platforms.
After the impression is loaded to the user’s browser, the information about the user interaction with the page and its viewing data is passed to the ad exchange and is offered on the auctions to the advertiser. Then, traditionally, the highest bid wins, after the winner implements a certain ad directly into the webpage. The main peculiarity of this process is that it is done in a few milliseconds.
As a rule, advertisers can also use the side platforms for defining the most profitable offers for purchase and the size of a bid they’re ready to pay for. The bid sum can also vary, and depends mostly on the users’ behavior data.
RTB is one of the types of programmatic advertising, which, unlike the other technology-driven platforms, implies direct bid auctioning instead of selling it in advance for a fixed price.
The main benefit of real-time bidding is its efficiency, as the ad owners don’t need to spend their time on the price negotiation. Instead, they have a wide range of options to choose from and saves a lot of resources and investments as well.
