You can now bump up your bids for mobile app ads in real time

The competition among mobile advertisers is heating up, and adtech companies are creating new kinds of ads to take advantage of it. One of the ideas being borrowed from desktop advertising is in-app header bidding, which is a way to get multiple ad networks to bid in real time to be the provider of an ad inside an app or mobile game.

Appodeal, an ad mediation platform, is introducing its own solution, dubbed Parallel Bidding, for mobile apps. Parallel Bidding works as a unified auction aimed at finding the highest paying ad among all the demand sources (such as ad networks or demand-side platforms) in real time, making their opportunities to bid on an ad opportunity equal.

With this Parallel Bidding system, advertisers compete harder, having all the publishers’ inventory at their disposal. This scenario allows mobile publishers to maximize their revenue opportunity, Appodeal said.

“We believe that parallel bidding technology is the next big thing in mobile in-app advertising,” said Appodeal CEO Pavel Golubev, in a statement. “Also, we are certain that developers have the right to clearly understand what’s happening inside their apps and have control over it. Thus, parallel bidding naturally aligns with our publishers’ and partners’ goals and requests. Even though parallel bidding is quite a new solution that has not been proven by years of experience yet, its value for the industry cannot be underestimated.”

Historically, this kind of advertising arose on the desktop. Header bidding showed the most profitable ads on the first spot of the website — its header. Real-time bidding was used in order to find the most profitable ads. Not long ago Facebook claimed that over 70 percent of the top North American web publishers monetize with ads via header bidding. So it has become a standard monetization means for web publishers.

Apps do not have headers, but the mode of operation is similar: When an app requests an ad, the advertisers compete directly in a unified auction, and they are offered an impression in the exact same time, not in any set order. That allows mobile apps publishers to make their ad inventory available to all buyers simultaneously, unlike in traditional waterfall approach (which requests ads step by step, from one ad demand source to another).

The main idea is that publishers simultaneously offer inventory to multiple exchanges before making calls to their ad servers. Based on historical ad rates, publishers will receive a predicted real-time rate for every request and user. That helps publishers maximize their overall ad revenue.

Parallel bidding is now implemented as an organic part of Appodeal’s software development kit (SDK). That means that after alpha testing stage, the technology will be automatically available for all Appodeal clients.

This Parallel Bidding technology provides closer access to the actual highest price per impression for publishers. In addition to that, it significantly reduces latency (interaction delays) and invigorates ad delivery. The ad requests and the auctions are processed on the server side; therefore, devices no longer need to run consecutive client-side ad requests.

Currently, Appodeal is in alpha testing with ad demand partners. It is trying to find the proper balance between Parallel Bidding and current mediation methods.

The integration for demand partners will be available via Open RTB, API call, and js-tags. OpenRTB is the open protocol between demand side platform (DSP) and supply side platform (SSP). An API call is when an API is requested to fetch data from another application. And Js-tags uses Javascript tags to request ads.

Appodeal currently gives mobile apps access to more than 60 ad demand sources competing against each other in real-time auction for every single ad impression, serving more than 30,000 apps, from indie to enterprise.