This page collects recommendations for Publishers interested in exploring ways to save carbon emissions while preserving revenue. See the Sustainability Portal for more background.
Regardless of the Prebid implementation, publishers seeking to improve sustainability and supply chain stance should focus on the following major areas:
When choosing bidders consider your internal requirements for HTTP2 support, adapter size, bid response time, response size, cookie loads and more.
The docs at https://docs.prebid.org/dev-docs/bidders.html contain information related to bidder feature support.
Questions to ask bidders before enabling them:
This is advice specific to Prebid.js.
Only build prebid with the bidders, modules and features that you intend to use.
The on-site builder is available at https://docs.prebid.org/download.html and instructions for building manually are in the Github repo https://github.com/prebid/Prebid.js/blob/master/README.md#Build. Building manually the JavaScript object name to be defined, but is otherwise the same.
Major areas to consider here are bid rates and participation which indicates whether the bid is meaningful. Fruitful areas to investigate first are geographic and currency support for the bidder. Consider delivering different script configurations based on Geo and Currency or using Header Bidding management providers which provide this service.
Configure an analytics provider that can track the related areas of interest from the building and monitoring section.
Prebid.js AdUnits can be configured to call different sets of bidders and modules in different geographic areas and for different devices. Ideally, this also implies different builds for each of these combinations. If this capability is not available in-house, consider a managed service that provides automatic performance-based reconfiguration of your Prebid.js configuration.
For example, instead of running a global Prebid.js build, consider creating separate builds for North America, Europe, APAC, or other regions important to your business. Each of those builds would be tailored to have the relevant bidders and modules.
Professor Prebid is a Chrome browser extension that provides setup validation, performance analysis, debugging and education about the live page behavior. Professor Prebid provides a wealth of information including:
It’s a great diagnostic tool, but is limited to the current page you are viewing, so you’ll still need an analytics adapter to provide comprehensive reports.
Use the Prebid.js debugging module to see other available data including bidder debug and the ability to inject configuration, intercept bids and mock responses.
Most bidders want to perform cookie syncing, which can impact page performance, and doesn’t always even help monetization on all browsers. Evaluate your cookie sync config for each bidder to ensure it meets your requirements.
For example, you may consider:
You can consider using Professor Prebid’s Usersync Info tool to investigate server-side syncs.
Ask your Prebid Server provider to provide guidance on how the sustainability profile of their global datacenters and traffic routing technology.
Ideally, your provider can handle user traffic in datacenters that are local to the user. e.g. North American user requests are processed in a North American datacenter.
Also, confirm that they regularly update Prebid Server to get the latest features.
Watching bidder performance by geo, device, and channel can help you decide how to set up the adunits. Channel is “Prebid.js”, “SDK”, “AMP”, etc – any traffic source supported by Prebid Server. Ask your Prebid Server provider which analytics systems they can support.
If you’re using Prebid.js, we recommend use of the Server-to-Server Testing Module to determine which bidders can be run on the server side.
If your Prebid Server provider has energy-efficient datacenters, then it may make sense to explore running as many bidders as possible server-side. This can help you focus traffic to network connections powered by more sustainable energy sources than what end-users may be consuming.
Ask your Prebid Server provider whether they’re utilizing bidder self-declared “Geographic Scope”. Several bidders have declared the regions in which they do business, so utilizing this information can help everyone save money and carbon emissions.
GeoScope examples
Ask your Prebid Server provider to confirm how they’ve set up cookie-syncing and whether they support setting:
See the relevant documentation for PBS-Java and PBS-Go.
You can consider using Professor Prebid’s Usersync Info tool to investigate server-side syncs.
Some Extended IDs (aka EIDs) are still experimental. The Prebid community tests some EIDs, but conclusions are often difficult to draw. Until we have more conclusive evidence on which EIDs are the most helpful for monetization, we encourage publishers to continue their own tests, which often means testing a dozen or more EIDs. You should monitor and reconfigure as value is proven (or not) with your properties.
See the Prebid Identity Overview
Prebid Mobile uses Prebid Server, so the recommendations above are relevant.
There are no recommendations specific to Prebid SDK at this time.