Ad operations are complex and this complexity is inherent to the programmatic ecosystem and ad tech as a whole. In case you’re planning to create your own ad network, you can’t underestimate ad ops role because the way you optimize ads and workflow impacts platform profitability and your revenues as well as revenues of your partners. The ad operations team is responsible not only for ad server maintenance. It can be also in charge of digital media distribution, inventory management, ensuring a great user experience, yield management, third party ad software integrations, and online ad campaigns execution. Time to find out what is an ad operation, how ad operations are delivered, and why your stack may need ad ops team.

What is Advertising Operations (Ad Ops)

Ad ops can be referred to as the process of support, management, maintenance, and online ads delivery. Ad operations don’t leave the well-being of your ad network to a mere chance. If you have ad ops it means that in your organization the team members from various departments work side-by-side to ensure stable and profitable operations ad processes. 

People employed in ad operations are directly in charge of profit generation for your network. Ad operations team consists of various professionals. The tech teams deal with code, ad servers, and all kinds of tech tasks. Business development works with sales and partner relationships. Accounts optimize ads, analyze, and configure overall campaign workflow for clients. In other words, ad ops is an ongoing relationship between technical dep, business development, and account ad ops team that work for the greater good of your business.

Digital Ad Operations Aspects - What Do Those Include? 

Digital ad operations are the part of ad ops process that utilizes the system for delivery and management of digital advertising. It can include various types of tasks: from traffic optimization to balancing traffic costs and matching supply with demand. The operations department should be maintained by ad operations team: developers, support team, and account specialists.

At the same time, keeping an in-house team is not something every company in the advertising industry can afford. In case you want to ease ad operations and bypass challenges of building advertising platform from scratch, opt for a white-label solution like SmartHub - it saves essential resources and time for platform building, designing, licensing, and establishing integrations, e.g OpenRTB. 

Built from the ground up the platform enables the creation of a self-branded open marketplace that can be launched by the enterprise in less than a month. With this platform, you can increase standards of media purchasing and generate more money on partners’ traffic. The operations ad process like platform management is ensured by our team. 

SmartHub solution will be plugged in as a complex service concept - our technical professionals will install the RTB-connected platform with essential modules, provide you with guides, manuals, and continuing advice regarding usage, optimization, and performance (via video calls). As a result, such technology will significantly simplify your online ad operations. 

How to Make Ad Network Perform Better with Digital Ad Ops

Advertising operations with SmartHub can significantly ease advertising campaign execution, elevate the media-trading outcomes and release the platform owner from potential technical issues. In order to maximize revenues on your advertising platform, it is essential that your ad operations team could have all the right tools in place. 

Keeping the servers stable is a typical ad operation but what is ad server? Ad server is the core of the ad network that keeps workflow smooth: It organizes creative delivery, rendering, ensures delivery speed, creative sequencing, supports auctions, reporting, and many other ad operations. A well-managed ad server is a guarantee of stable ad network workflow and seamless creative rendering. The most important task for your ad network is to ensure that servers are always working. For instance, when the number of incoming QPS exceeds the limit on SmartyAds White Label ad exchange (SmartHub), the system automatically notifies the admin about it so that they could prevent server overload and change QPS plan.

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Setting new partner and third party software integrations is an essential part of ad operations. There’s no denying that OpenRTB 3.0 protocol enables quick and easy partner connection, however certain SSP partners inside of your network may still require VAST tags standard integration. In such a case it is important to have a technical professional by your side who could configure custom partner integration along with general endpoints for RTB partners. Using SmartHub functionality admins can do it quickly using links to GET requests. When the connection is established, the system will translate requests from SSPs into OpenRTB format and send them to DSPs. Then the responses will be converted back into VAST and sent to SSPs. 

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Ad fraud prevention is the first procedure that you need to have included in your ad operations - it helps you to avoid advertising money loss. Adx.txt, app-ads.txt, ads.cert, sellers.json are those standards of IAB that were released in order to protect digital inventory from fraudsters. For instance, when your ad network has available sellers.json files like SmartHub, ad managers can publish it for SSPs. The file will list all legitimate sellers and resellers of inventory from each SSP. The DSPs will access the file and easily discover who the requests really belong to. This will contribute to effective and safe inventory management on your platform. 

Quality is an essential characteristic of traffic that makes DSP partners want to obtain it from your platform, that’s why real-time traffic scanning should be an essential part of your ad operations. With TMT, Botmat, GeoEdge, and the rest of the pre and post-bid scanners on SmartHub ad operations like scanning get much easier. There are plenty of ways your ad operations team or advertising professionals should navigate and shape up the traffic. SmartHub has an in-built traffic throttling system that analyzes DSPs’ bid responses to monitor what kind of traffic each DSP bids on. The more DSPs bid on certain GEOs, the more relevant traffic will be attributed to DSPs. This way each online ad campaign on DSP will be supplied with the right traffic. This, in turn will contribute to better yield management. 

Setting up the right filters is also a typical and essential ad operation. For successful and smooth ad operations it is important to know which digital ad formats and ad campaigns generate the highest profits. By revising statistics in SmartHub platform admins can investigate the revenues brought by formats during the period (rich media banner, native, video, or else). See how much money ad formats brought today and compare them to yesterday’s performance utilizing convenient stats in the dashboard. This feature will greatly simplify such important ad operations as analytics. Below you can see revenue distribution by formats (rich media banner, video, native, push and pop).Demand side SmartHub

To wrap it up

Ad ops advertising enables ad network owners to overcome possible pitfalls of solution functioning. In the same way, these professionals can make the workflow on the platform easy and seamless. Instead of learning all technical aspects of platform operation and workflow management, businesses can set up a fully serviced ad tech platform and focus on strategic business planning.

In its turn, SmartHub is so easy to use ad tech solution that can make your ad operations faster and more efficient. The system is transparent so you can see the performance per format, ad campaign, or traffic type. 

Our specialists can provide you with comprehensive ad operations service - full dev support, technical support during integrations, and third-party data-provider integrations for a non-standard partner connection. We will design and deploy your ad serving architecture according to the needs and objectives that you have in mind. If you need ad tech development on demand, don't forget to let us know!

Ease your ad ops with SmartHub and earn more from partners' traffic! 

Written by
Roman Vrublivskyi, Business Development Manager of SmartHub
February 2020