Does Exchange Bidding Work?

Kayci Scaggs
January 28, 2021
June 12, 2023
Does Exchange Bidding Work?

Google’s Exchange Bidding has landed! With the beta version having been rolled out across our publishers, the results are better than we could have imagined. We were delighted to present these results at the adx Bootcamp in Sydney today to a packed room full of publishers.

Let’s start with the implementation. The implementation of Exchange Bidding is without a doubt one of the simplest implementations out. With header bidding, one of the major drawbacks for publishers has been the heavy dev work involved. The dev work is complex and often places a huge strain on small and medium sized publishers. We have put a lot of work into making this process as streamlined for publishers as possible and have come a long way.

How to enable Exchange Bidding

Our Simple 6-Step Guide

Google seems to have mitigated this limitation of header bidding. The Exchange Bidding implementation requires only one piece of code to be updated on the site. After this initial implementation, there are no tedious and complex code updates that need to be made to the site, as is regularly the case with header bidding.

Exchange bidding has immense power. The simplicity in terms of implementation extends to ongoing management and updates to the product. Rather than changes having to be made to the code on your webpage (which requires a lot of dev time), all optimisations from within dfp. In this way, Exchange bidding means that networks are being hosted within the Google product suite.

Google claimed that this product should result in a 40% cpm uplift for publishers. And based on the rollout of this product across our publishers, Google hasn’t come short on their promise. We’ve seen an impressive 43% cpm uplift on average, from the publishers we’ve rolled Exchange Bidding out on.

Header bidding vs. Exchange Bidding

How Does Exchange Bidding Actually Work?

Exchange Bidding moves away from the typical code structure of ad serving and instead functions via a ‘server to server’ interaction. There are a few key steps involved:

When a user visits a site and an ad request is triggered and is sent to DFP

DFP then runs a unified auction to determine the ad that will generate the best yield.

This involves DFP selecting the best line item to compete in the auction and then sending a bid request to particular eligible yield partners. DFP collects the highest big from each partner.

The winning creative (after dynamic allocation and the Exchange bidding auctions) is displayed on the publisher’s site.

The server-to-server basis for this product means that page-load latency is also reduced.  

You can find a more detailed analysis on our presentation delivered at the Google Bootcamp here

The official release of this product is very exciting. Reach out to us if you’d like to avail of Exchange Bidding with Publift!

If you’re making more than $2,000 in monthly ad revenue, contact us today to learn more about how Publift can help increase your ad revenue and best optimize the ad space available on your website or app.

Grow with us

Grow your business with a sustainable, long term partnership. If you're making more than $2,000 in monthly ad revenue, contact us today to boost your revenue with our all-in-one solution.
Laptop screen with web page open

Success Stories