As the amount of advertising that is bought programmatically continues to rise, header bidding has become a go-to ad selling tactic for publishers.
Four years ago, publishers began using header bidding to sell their digital inventory. This revolutionized automated advertising because it allowed them to simultaneously offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges before making calls to their ad servers. Previously, programmatic publishers used an approach called waterfalling that passed bids sequentially from one exchange to the next.
The way publishers and advertisers approach programmatic has changed significantly since header bidding debuted. Here are five charts about the state of header bidding.
How Common Is Header Bidding?
Despite drawbacks like latency, header bidding continues to gain popularity. Among the internet’s most popular 1,000 sites that sell programmatic ads, 79.2% used header bidding in March 2019, according to ad serving company Adzerk. As the chart below shows, header bidding is still incrementally gaining adoption even though a high share of publishers have been using it for a while.