How to determine winning auction prices for ads served to me?

Question

With personal data mining in the news, monetization of this data and ultimately the valuation that Facebook, Google and others enjoy, derives from showing ads.

I have what should be a pretty simple question-

How much are advertisers actually paying to show me an ad? What's the winning price in each auction run for me?

Prior art, there was a project called YourValue:

https://team.inria.fr/privatics/yourvalue/

http://privatics.inrialpes.fr/~lukasz/rtbdesc.html

http://privatics.inrialpes.fr/~lukasz/rtbdesc2.html

It was able to extract pricing on some sites, and had a Firefox and Chrome plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rtbwatcher/

Unfortunately it had very little adoption, and the project as a whole has now been dead for several years. It's unclear if the price detection machinery is still valid.

In the realm of current work, header bidding and prebid.js can shed light on pricing:

http://prebid.org/dev-docs/toubleshooting-tips.html#see-all-bids-in-the-console

But very few sites are using prebid.

What's a programmatic way I figure out what my eyeballs are worth to advertisers across different sites?

Answer 1

prebid.js can shed light on pricing

I think this is your best bet!

Facebook aside, GAM / Google Ad Manager (formerly Doubleclick For Publishers) is responsible for serving the lion's share of ads, but the clientside library that facilitates this is GPT / googletag, doesn't expose the value of impressions sold.

As such, peeking at offers that Prebid networks make on impressions gives you access to a sample of indicative values of the impressions on the current site, from your location, etc.

Prebid header-bidding is a first-price auction, so the highest Prebid bid is sent to GAM, which then conducts a second-price auction, and auctions are conducted in CPM, which stands for Cost Per Mille, or cost per thousand impressions.

So if, for a single impression:

• Appnexus bids 0.50
• Rubicon bids 0.61

via prebid, then a winning bid of 0.61 is sent to GAM. If

• Google Ad Exchange then bids 0.90

...they'll actually pay just enough to beat the second price, so: $0.62 per 1000 impressions = $0.00062.

There are so many shortcomings with this... we're skipping over a bunch of complexities like price granularity, discrepancies, and especially the fact that this is what the publisher was paid (excluding possible revshare agreements with networks), not what the advertiser spent! Still... it's indicative!

There's a great Chrome extension for monitoring auctions: AdWizard, which demonstrates how you can listen for prebid events such as bidWon and googletag's event slotRenderEnded and combine the data to establish whether Prebid won the auction, and what the winning CPM was.

You could examine the source and use the very same listeners in your own browser extension to post this data to your logging server, so that you can aggregate data about your browsing later...

Answer 2

I think header bidding is the most important advancement in ad tech since the introduction of real-time bidding (RTB).

The main reason for saying it is:

Header bidding is an additional auction that takes place outside of the ad server, in the header of a web page, which loads before anything else on the page. The header typically contains metadata about the page and calls scripts used for formatting the style of the page, tracking, and so on. Because of this, it’s an ideal area to conduct a new auction.

Image below shows information about percentage of client side tools for header bidding:

Client side Header Bidding

You can choice a most used tools like Criteo but it's not free.

S2S Header Bidding

It's true that only about 12 percent of the Alexa top 1,000 websites — 121 sites — are using client side header bidding.

The Problems with Client-Side Header Bidding is (for more info please see my reference):

1. Browser request limitations
2. High ad and page latency
3. Limiting response times
4. Auction discrepancies
5. Negative UX impact

As a result, many sites use S2S header bidding.

S2S header bidding works in pretty much the same way as client-side except for one change: Instead of the user’s browser, the auction now happens outside on a server provided by a technology partner.

Only one code needs to be inserted in the header now to communicate with the server instead of one code for every demand partner. This small change makes a big difference, let’s see how in the next section.

In conclusion, you can use S2S header bidding for doing it better.