Websites and Zones in terms of AdServer

To make it simple regarding websites there are no surprises what is website in the Ad Server platforms technology. As it name implies it is just simply website. Places everybody are visiting daily and place where ads are displayed.

These days when you visit website what will you also see in the most cases are different advertisements. Big banner at the top, video ad in the middle and even some text ads. And this brings us to the second important term in the world of Ad Servers.

Ad Zone

So what is actually Ad Zone?
Ad Zone is unique place where ad is displayed.

So if you take common website most probably on each of the pages you will see ad at the top of the page. Top of the page is header and it is the same header through out the whole website. So this you will identify as one Ad Zone. So no matter on how many pages ad is displayed basically it is just one same place.
So one way of thinking what is Ad zone is to think about unique place where ad is displayed.

But you can also think about ad zones from selling point of view. In this case Ad zone is place on your website which you can rent for real money. And those who rented this place will display they ads on the website. So somebody can e.g. pay you to display his own ads in the header. So header is the ad zone.

Mobile vs desktop
In the pre-mobile era there was no difference between mobile and desktop website. These days this is usually different. So while it is the same website zone is different. You can sell to one partner header on your desktop website and also header to another partner.

In this case you actually have two zones. Mobile header and desktop header.


Tree structure
If we put all these together then actually websites and zones create kind of tree structure. On the top of the structure is website and zones are leafs of such tree. Have a look on the screenshot from the Lite Ad Server platform.

As you can see in the picture above it is obvious that advertising website has 5 different Ad Zones.

Responsibility of ad servers is to display ads in the ad zones.

Basics of Ad Servers

Although my responsibilities are mainly technical I was lucky enough to also get much more into online sales business. As we are using lot of advertising, banners and ad serving I got lot of experience with that.

When I moved more into advertising I found out lot of new buzz words for me. Some of them are Ad Server, creative, pop-under, A/B testing, zone, ad space, campaign, landing pages...

To my big surprise even number of experienced persons still do have confusion regarding all these. The problem is that online advertising and online sales very often much more looks like magic than something where you can setup some real processes.

Anyway there are some standard rule sets valid for every company which wants to advertise product or service using Ad Server and banners (or better tell creatives).

This brought me to decision to write series of blog posts which will help others to get good understanding into basics of ad servers, ad serving and other commonly used terms in online advertising.

In the next post I will start with basics. We will see what is actually web site and zone in the online marketing. As we get deeper into the matter I will use Lite Ad Server in examples. This way we will be able to see everything mentioned in practice.