MAILE OHYE: Hi.
My name is Maile Ohye.
I'm a senior support engineer at Google.
In this third and final video in our series on third party
ad serving, we'll take a closer look at the nuts and
bolts of how ad servers actually serve the ads we see.
Let's walk through the process.
First, our fictitious advertiser, Sports Gear, has
to place all of its ads into its ad server.
The ad server then creates tags containing technical
instructions on things like the ad size and where the ad
should be located on the web page.
The tags are sent to the publisher, along with
information about Sports Gear's ad campaign, like the
number of times to show each ad and whether to target the
ad to a certain age, gender, interest,
or geographic location.
Next, our fictitious publisher, the New York
Journal, puts the tags and instructions
into its own ad server.
So all of Sports Gear's ad instructions go into the New
York Journal's ad server.
But the sports ads themselves stay on
Sports Gear's ad server.
All of the New York Journal's other advertisers also send
the New York Journal tags and instructions for their ad
campaigns, but keep the ads
themselves on their ad servers.
So once the advertiser's ad server and the publisher's ad
server are ready, they look something like this.
What's in Sports Gear's ad server?
Its inventory of ads.
What's on the publisher's side?
The tags and instructions from the advertisers, including
those from Sports Gear.
So what happens next?
Well, let's say I come along and decide I want to check out
the New York Journal's sports section.
I type the New York Journal's URL into my browser.
And my browser makes a request, saying, I want this
web page from the New York Journal.
When this request reaches the New York Journal, its server
then sends the page I want to my browser.
As my browser loads the page, it understands that the page
contains content, but no ad.
So how does my browser get the ad?
My browser follows the instructions provided by the
New York Journal, which tells it to ask for an ad from the
New York Journal's ad server.
In this case, the New York Journal's ad server decides to
show a Sports Gear ad.
Since the New York Journal's ad server doesn't have any
actual ads, it instructs my browser, through the
information in a tag, to get an ad from Sports Gear's ad
server, which is housing all of Sports Gear's ad inventory.
Sports Gear's ad server has to figure out which ad to show.
A cookie helps it do that.
How?
Well, at the same time the New York Journal's ad server sent
my browser content, it also sent my browser a cookie.
In this case, a cookie is a small file that travels back
and forth between my browser and both the publisher's ad
server and the advertiser's ad server during
the ad serving process.
A cookie's job is to identify a browser.
Each cookie has an ID, usually a combination of letters and
numbers that, in this case, identifies my
browser to ad servers.
This allows them to keep track of the ads that are shown in
my browser, so they can do things like control the number
of times I see a given ad, and also allows
them to target ads.
So let's go back to Sports Gear's ad server having to
choose which ad I see.
It may be the case, for example, that their basketball
shoes are sold out.
So the basketball shoe ads are ruled out.
Or maybe it's too soon for the football season.
So the football ads are ruled out, as well.
Or it could be that Sports Gear wants to target its ads
to a specific age or interest segment.
So it chooses a Sports Gear golf ad because the cookie
allows it to associate my browser with a 30 year old
female golfer.
Now that we've got a Sports Gear golf ad,
what happens next?
Well, when Sports Gear's ad server sends the Sports Gear
golf ad to my browser, it also sends along a cookie that
allows it to identify my browser.
This allows Sports Gear's ad server to do things like track
how many Sports Gear ads my browser has been shown.
After this entire process, I finally see a
Sports Gear golf ad.
Here it is.
A lot goes on in the second or two it takes for a web page to
load in my browser.
And you can see all this activity happening if you
check out the bottom left of your screen as the URL
requests are processed.
You'll see that, in the course of a few seconds, your browser
is sending requests to one or more ad servers, even though
you never went to these ad servers' sites.
And this whole process is done
automatically by computer servers.
No people are involved in selecting or
serving display ads.
That's how it can all happen so quickly.
So I hope this video series gives you a better idea of how
a third party ad serving works.
Thanks for watching, and thanks for using Google.