Six Things You Need to Know About Real-Time Display Advertising

If you haven't heard of real time bidding, or RTB, you need to. First, let us explain. When a user heads to a webpage and it starts loading, the siite automaticallly sends out a bid request to tens of hundreds of potential advertisers (on an RTB network) saying, "We've got this user who is 30, Indian, male and based in New Jersey, US, and recently searched for return air tickets to Delhi, opening a page on our site. How much are you willing to bid for being the only ad on this page?" Within about 100 milliseconds the publisher gets automated bids from different advertisers which are then analyzed to figure out the highest bidder and the brands being advertised. The winner is automatically alerted by the publisher site and the ad is published. Nifty, huh?

Over the last year and a half, Quantcast has worked towards definining the rules of this new online ad buying process. They have found that RTB campaigns perform quite well however, they have learned that many of the original assumptions and hypotheses shared throughout the industry have turned out to be wrong.

This Quantcast whitepaper, part of the Adrants whitepaper series, is the first in a series that will explain what has been learned in the world of real time bidding. Download this whitepaper now to discover the six reasons why some perfectly reasonable hypotheses of RTB 1.0 have turned out to be flawed and learn how to do RTB right.