Before you start your Prebid implementation, you need to have signed on with an ad server. As an independent header bidding solution, Prebid was designed to work with any ad server. One step in determining how your integration is going to work is exploring the type of support your ad server has for header bidding and how you’re going to use it. We’re not able to provide details on all ad servers, but we can give you some general information on the most popular ad servers and those the Prebid community has documented.
Note that not many ad servers currently have native support for header bidding. This is a reminder to check with your ad server to see what they support directly before you move forward.
If you want to include information about a particular ad server not documented here, create a PR in our Github repo.
Google Ad Manager (GAM) is currently the most-used ad server. Google is beta testing header bidding support in yield groups, a technology to help publishers manage external integrations. Because header bidding often involved the creation of hundreds or even thousands of line items, yield groups could be a useful option. Here are some things to consider when deciding whether to use GAM yield groups with Prebid:
For step-by-step instructions on using GAM, see the Google Ad Manager Step by Step.
We don’t currently have details on specific header bidding support in other ad servers. But practically speaking, these are the requirements to integrate Prebid into an ad server:
The ability to pass key-value pairs into the ad call.
See the getAdserverTargeting function for engineering instructions on creating whatever format is required.
For step-by-step instructions on using some of the other ad servers, see the following documentation: