Real Time Bidding (RTB) In Online Display Advertising

Today I stumbled over how the Real Time Bidding (RTB) in online display advertising world works, I must say it's quite fascinating stuff. The beauty of it is- "the response rate", it is soooo fast that you will be awestruck with this technology, anything between 300-500Millisecond !!

Check the steps I found from Wikipedia on how is the flow of Real Time Bidding (RTB)-

• A user's browser requests a webpage of a site that uses real time bidding
• The user's browser receives the HTML for the webpage. Embedded in this HTML is a URL tag for an ad request
• The user's browser makes a call out to the ad server
• The ad server calls out the SSP that this website is using. Sometimes SSP and the ad server are integrated such as 24/7 Real Media OpenAdstream or Google's DFP & AdX systems.
• SSP makes a call out to one or more ad exchanges
• An ad exchange makes multiple call outs (bid requests) to several DSPs trying to get the best price
• DSPs evaluate the bid request and decide how much they want to bid and respond with bids to the exchange
• The exchange selects the highest bid with a URL of the winning ad and returns that to the SSP
• SSP returns the winning bid to the ad server
• The ad server finally responds with an ad to the browser of the Internet user which started all these transactions

 The link to Wiki page is here.

I tried to capture the steps in the into graphical form so that it becomes more clearer with the explanation.

Real Time Bidding (RTB) Flow

Please double click the image for a better view.