Ad Network Platform Development: Types, Process, Challenges and Solutions

The shift towards programmatic advertising has unlocked the door for advertisers and ad agencies to reach a broader audience across websites and apps, empowering publishers to monetize more effectively through strategic revenue models. Therefore, for AdTech companies and ad agencies with specific requirements and objectives, building a custom ad network platform can prove transformative or even revolutionary in technology-based media buying & selling workflow.

By developing your ad network platform, you gain the flexibility to design and manage advertising strategies that align perfectly with your goals. Whether you’re looking to optimize ad placements, improve targeting, or increase revenue streams, building an ad network platform allows you to take complete control of your advertising ecosystem.

Are you facing the dilemma of whether to build your ad network or rent one? Continue reading this blog and get insights into each aspect of ad network development, including key steps for creating it from scratch, things to consider while choosing an ad network, and much more.

Table of Contents:

• Types of Ad Networks
• Reasons to Consider Ad Network Platform Development in Your Ad Strategy
• Impact of Ad Networks on Programmatic CTV Advertising
• Steps to Build an Ad Network Platform from Scratch
• Key Challenges in Developing an Advertising Network and Their Solutions
• Build a White Label Ad Network Solution with Us to Maximize Your Revenues
• Frequently Asked Questions

The rise of advertising networks has led to their expansion and diversification, resulting in several types of ad network platforms available today.  Here is a list:

Inventory & Reach Based Ad Network

1. Horizontal Ad Networks: This type of ad network offers a wide range of diversified ad inventory for broad reach and scale. This includes various websites, mobile apps, e-commerce platforms, entertainment sites, and more. This extensive inventory enables advertisers numerous opportunities to enhance their audience reach through various targeting options.
2. Vertical Ad Networks: Targeting a specific industry or niche is a key factor in this type of ad network. It connects niche advertisers with relevant publishers, allowing for more refined targeting of specific audiences with relevant ads. Vertical ad networks offer deeper insights into targeted audiences and more effective ad inventory placement
3. Premium Ad Networks: As the name suggested, this is a form of ad network that is a collective group of top-tier publishers comprising high-quality websites, apps, and digital platforms that offer a large engagement ratio and have a loyal audience. In this case, an advertiser can get premium-quality ad inventory at a higher cost.

Ad Network Based on Platform

1. Mobile Ad Networks: By utilizing mobile ad networks, advertisers can seamlessly connect with app publishers for the ad media buying process by prioritizing mobile ads inventory. These include banner ads, interstitials, and native ads. According to reports, the global mobile advertising market size is expected to reach $382.9 bn by 2028^[1], growing at a CAGR of 14.27%.
2. Connected TV Ad Networks: It enables advertisers to reach audiences through traditional commercial ad formats on CTVs and streaming devices.
3. Social Media Ad Networks: The growing number of social media ad networks specialize in delivering ads within social media platforms to offer unique targeting platforms based on user profiles and behavior.
4. DOOH Ad Networks: Driven by demand for location-based, contextually relevant, and immersive advertising experiences, Digital-Out-of-Home ad networks leverage digital screens and billboards to reach audiences through contextually relevant ads in various locations.

For advertisers and publishers, connecting with each other and reaching the right audience through traditional methods is often a major challenge. The development of an ad network and its incorporated capabilities provides a powerful way to target audiences, enhance campaign management, optimize spending, and improve many other aspects. Here are the key reasons why you should build your own ad network platform:

Tailored Targeting Capabilities: Developing your own ad network allows you to expand your reach and scale of targeting capabilities. With advanced technologies like AI/ML, data intelligence, data analytics, and data science built in, the ad network platforms offer multiple targeting options, including custom, data-driven, cross-platform targeting, and more. It allows you to develop precise audience segmentation, go beyond the standard demographic, and focus on behaviors and contextual targeting to deliver highly relevant ads. Additionally, you can create custom targeting parameters by leveraging first-party data and open real-time bidding to enhance the precision targeting of your ad campaigns.

Automate Matching: Ad network platform development utilizes multiple sophisticated ML algorithms. One of these algorithms is designed to enhance the ad network with automation capabilities, aiming to create the perfect match between advertisers and publishers that automatically pairs the latter’s ad inventory with demand from various sources. This helps maximize ad fill rates and revenue. First, the ad network collects data from advertisers’ ad campaigns and publishers’ platforms, analyzes the data, and identifies the best matches between them. This algorithm considers many key factors, such as relevant keywords, user behavior, previous attempts, and performance.

Unified Reporting and Analytics: An ad network is built with a single dashboard to track ad campaign performance, providing detailed, granular insights on data such as engagement rate, platforms with higher engagement, types of audiences, conversion rates, and more. Advanced analytics simplify the process of analyzing, optimizing, and monitoring the performance of ad campaigns. Additionally, it provides insights into the customer journey, segments data based on various criteria, and enables speedy alterations, all supported by powerful data visualization tools.

Simplifies Payment Process: An advertising network platform handles end-to-end payment transactions between advertisers and publishers. As a central point for financial transactions, it aggregates unsold or remnant ad inventory from multiple publishers. It offers it to advertisers at a lower price than the publisher’s initial offer while facilitating larger, less frequent payments from advertisers. An ad network establishes consistent payment schedules and consolidates the payment process into a single operation, ultimately reducing the administrative burden for all parties involved.

Real-Time Bidding: Not all, but many ad network platforms are built with RTB models. This enables advertisers to participate in online auctions and secure ad space through bidding. Consequently, it makes the ad buying process more efficient, improves ad relevancy, and offers flexibility in monitoring and optimizing ad campaigns based on performance. Google’s ad network^[2] is a well-known example of an ad network that operates with an RTB model.

Ad networks continue to shape the rapidly evolving programmatic CTV advertising landscape. It is fast incorporating various aspects of AdTech, such as supply-side platforms, demand-side platforms, ad exchanges, and data management platforms. Programmatic advertising was valued at 546 billion U.S. dollars in 2023 and is expected to reach 779 billion by 2028^[3].

From allowing numerous choices of convenient and results-oriented ad distribution methods to building a reliable source of revenue generation, ad networks enhance programmatic advertising in multiple ways. Ad networks heavily rely on cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure to streamline the ad buying and selling process. This includes the aggregation of inventory from publishers and its allocation to advertisers through a single platform or user interface.

It enables granular targeting and helps advertisers reach highly specific audience segments across various CTV channels by combining first-party data from CTV platforms with third-party data sources.  The integration of RTB in ad networks enables dynamic ad placement and pricing in real-time, allowing advertisers to adjust their campaigns on the fly, thus ensuring maximum ROI.

Through advanced targeting capabilities powered by advanced data analytics and ML algorithms, together with real-time bidding models, ad networks enable the delivery of ads to relevant audiences. Integration with data management platforms further enhances the measurement and activation of ad campaigns. Overall, ad network development in programmatic advertising makes ad transactions more streamlined, targeted, and impactful.

The prospect of how to build your own ad network may seem easy to implement at first glance, but building a future-proof and progressive ad network requires complex programming, API integration, and robust features. Let’s walk you through the step-by-step approach to make the entire process easier and more transparent:

Understand the Market Dynamics:

• Identify the niche that determines the specific segment of the advertising market your ad network will serve (e.g., mobile, display, video).
• Do not forget to analyze your competitors. Appropriate research of existing ad networks, including the ruling one, helps you to identify gaps and opportunities to add to your potential ad network platform.
• Define your value proposition by clarifying what sets your ad network apart, such as better targeting, improved ROI, unique ad formats, etc.

Choose the Right Business Model:

• Select the ad pricing model by deciding between CPM, CPC, CPA, or a hybrid model based on your audience’s needs and business demand.
• Define the revenue-sharing structure. Establish a fair revenue split between your platform and participating publishers to attract quality inventory.

Leverage Advanced AdTech Solutions:

In this stage, you should prioritize various AdTech platforms as per your business and audience needs:

• Ad Server Development implementation or partner with an ad server that is proficient in managing and delivering ads with minimal latency.
• Integrate supply-side platform (SSP) in order to collect publisher’s available inventory and unlock the path of easier ad placements management.
• Leverage robust demand-side platform (DSP) to allow advertisers/ad agencies to set up, manage, and optimize their campaigns effectively.

Harness the Power of Cloud Infrastructure:

• Choose scalable cloud solutions like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure to ensure the scalability, security, and reliability of your ad network
• For effective data management and activation, implement cloud-based data management systems for real-time processing, analysis of vast amounts of data, and insightful dataset generation.

Develop a User-Centric Interface:

• Focus on creating a dashboard that provides real-time analytics and performance metrics for both advertisers and publishers.
• To offer a seamless user experience, ensure the platform is easy to navigate and use with the latest features like campaign setup, budget allocation, and reporting that can be done in just a few clicks.

Implement Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Advanced Targeting:

• RTB Integration allows advertisers to actively bid on impressions as per inventory availability and maximize ad relevance, which leads to better ROI.
• Integrating AI in programmatic advertising enables advanced targeting capabilities with algorithms and machine learning modules. It offers precise targeting options based on demographics, behavior, and contextual data.

Integrate with Data Management Platforms (DMPs):

• Incorporate DMPs to refine the media buying process through efficient gathering and segmentation of audience data, enhancing the targeting capabilities of your ad network.
• Better data utilization will be needed to create more personalized and effective ad campaigns, eventually improving engagement and conversion rates.

Building and implementing ad network platforms comes with several challenges. These can be hurdles to efficiently integrating ad networks in the ad media buying process. Here are a few major challenges and their solutions.

Data Privacy & Compliance:

• Challenge: Keeping pace with the complex landscape of data privacy regulations, including GDPR and CCPA, and ensuring compliance is a significant challenge. Even a minor oversight can damage the company’s goodwill and reputation.
• Solution: Focus on key metrics such as data minimization, consent management, and data security by restricting unauthorized access or breaches. Staying informed and up-to-date regarding data privacy and regulations also helps overcome this challenge.

Ad Fraud and Viewability:

• Challenge: Preventing ad fraud and ensuring that ad views are from genuine users.
• Solution: Utilize ad verification tools to detect and prevent fraud and employ techniques to identify and block fraudulent traffic. Implement viewability measurement techniques to ensure that ads receive authentic views.

Competition and Market Saturation:

• Challenge: Standing out in a competitive marketplace with established ad networks.
• Solution: Offer a unique value proposition, develop specialized targeting capabilities and options, introduce innovative ad formats, collaborate with other companies to expand reach, and focus on niche markets.

In the growing programmatic advertising landscape, Rishabh Software caters to the ad industry with its AdTech software development services. We assist advertisers, publishers, and ad agencies of all sizes in leveraging smart advertising solutions that are secure, scalable, and specially designed for their unique ad business workflows and operations.

Our expertise spans the development of core AdTech platforms like SSP, DSP, DMP, Ad exchange, and Ad network to next-gen AdTech solutions & services like Connected TV (CTV) advertising, ad optimization, data analytics and reporting, and consultation, solution integration.

Leveraging our years of experience in programmatic advertising, we enable businesses to streamline their ad operations, optimize ad bidding, and improve ad delivery through precisely targeted ad campaigns. Our solutions also help them expand reach and revenue while mitigating ad fraud and ensuring brand safety.

Q: What are the different monetization models offered by Ad Networks?

A: Ad networks offer various monetization models that differ in the form of meeting the goals and needs of advertisers and publishers. Here are fey ways:

• Cost Per Mille (CPM)
• Cost Per Click (CPC)
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
• Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• Cost Per Install (CPI)
• Flat Rate or Fixed Pricing

Q: Should you build or rent an Ad Network?

A: Decision-making between building or renting an ad network depends thoroughly on your business model, goals, and resources. Building your own ad network offers you full control, customization, and data ownership. Conversely, renting is a much faster process and more cost-effective, but it lacks the control and flexibility that building your own network provides.

Q: How do you choose the right Ad Network?

A: Here is a quick list of things to consider while choosing an ad network for your business strategy:

• Ensure the ad network aligns with your targeted audience.
• Keep your campaign goals in mind.
• Focus on the various ad formats provided by the ad network platform.
• Prioritize targeting options for better results and relevant ad reach.
• Compare pricing models with other existing ad network platforms used by your competitors.
• Evaluate the customer support process of the ad network vendor

Q: Examples of popular Ad Networks

A: Here is a quick of the most popular ad network platforms:

• Google Ads
• Microsoft Advertising
• Amazon Publisher Services
• AppNexus

Footnote:

1. https://www.technavio.com/report/mobile-advertising-market-industry-analysis
2. https://ads.google.com/intl/en_in/home/
3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/275806/programmatic-spending-worldwide/