03-11-2014, 11:37 AM
Abstracts: “Ad server” describes the technology and service that places advertisements on websites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns. An ad server is a computer server, specifically a web server, which stores advertisements used in online marketing and delivers them to website visitors. The content of the webserver is constantly updated so that the website or webpage on which the ads are displayed contains new advertisements—e.g., banners (static images/animations)—when the site or page is visited or refreshed by a user. The purpose of ad serving is to deliver targeted ads that match the website visitor's interest. Ad serving also performs various other tasks like counting the number of impressions/clicks for an ad campaign and report generation, which helps in determining the ROI (release of information) for an advertiser on a particular website. Ad servers can be run locally or by third-party or remote ad servers. Local ad servers are typically run by a single publisher and serve ads to that publisher's domains, allowing fine-grained creative, formatting, and content control by that publisher. Remote ad servers can serve ads across domains owned by multiple publishers. They deliver the ads from one central source so that advertisers and publishers can track the distribution of their online advertisements, and have one location for controlling the rotation and distribution of their advertisements across the web.