RTB-enabled Advertising: Ad Exchange development project

In the RTB-enabled advertising, there are two important players, Ad Exchange and Demand Side Platform (DSP). The Ad Exchange aggregates advertising impressions from publishing partners and sends the bid request for the impression with the information about the advertising slot to DSPs. The Ad Exchange does the auction after receiving bid responses from all participating DSPs or the deadline is passed, and notifies the user’s web browser about the auction winner, so that the web browser will send the advertising impression request to the advertising server where the advertising creative is located.

The objective of the Ad Exchange project, designed for Adforge Ad Platform, was to create and develop scalable online service that implements core features of the Ad Exchange system, and to define a framework/environment indicating how this service can and should be built in a full scale and how actors of the display advertising ecosystem are interrelated via the Ad Exchange in the ambitious feature-rich version of the service.

Created and supported during 2016 this project of the highly performant Ad Exchange successfully achieved desired outcomes, implementing well defined properties of Ad Exchange and introducing also unique features. This is a scalable software system, designed with high availability and fault tolerance in mind.

Requests processing and auction:

• validation of bid-requests and bid reponces due to OpenRTB 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 validation schema;
• processing of banner, video and native ads;
• support of single and multiple impressions in bid requests, exchange supports selling one or several ad positions on a given page;
• support private marketplace container for direct deals between buyers and sellers with specific bidfloor, bidfloor currency and auction type;
• support nurl and adm for notification.

Ad Exchange management RPC and console:

• publisher defaults: auction type, OpenRTB version, currencies, minimal floor and margins for different ad types and platforms;
• bidder settings: url, QPS limitations, OpenRTB version, pre-tagetting, nurl and adm macro, throttling;
• support and maintenance of RTB core application for Quality Exchange;
• video tags support accorss mobile and desktop VAST 1,2,3, VPAID1 & VPAID2.

Requests filtration:

• filtrations for specific Bidder, reason - drop requests not intresting for bidder on exchnage side;
• filtration fields: Ad's type, placement, dimentions, geo, platform, publisher;
• effective processing of large rules data set.

Internal statistics:

• collecting stats for all requests, responces, wins, errors, impressions;
• Stats inventory: publisher, bidder, geo, platform, ad type etc.

Publisher and Bidder QPS limitaion and throttling:

• max QPS limitation for each node of the Ad Exchange cluster;
• max QPS limitation for Publisher;
• max QPS limitation for Bidder;
• throttle bidders requests by errors and timeouts rate
• throttle bidders requests by win to impressions conversion rate.

Statistics subsystem via S3-Hadoop-Impala tools chain:

• basic reports with fast aggregation by affiliate and zones;
• geo report (events breakdown by geo parameters);
• domain report (events breakdown by geo domains)
• platform/ad modality/protocol report;
• player size report;
• extended VAST/VPAID errors report.