RTB ad quality
RTB ad quality: scan where winning bids send your visitors
When you sell traffic over real-time bidding, the winning ad arrives at the moment of the auction and is never stored. GoAdScanner records where each winning bid sends the visitor and opens that page the way it was served.
The blind spot in RTB
With a direct campaign you have the ad tag, and you can scan it. With real-time bidding you don’t: the buyer’s ad comes in with the winning bid and is gone after the auction, so there is no tag to add to a scan task. What the bid does contain is where it sends the visitor.
That is what GoAdScanner checks, for traffic you sell to outside buyers through a Selling SSP campaign in GoAdserver. See GoAdserver’s RTB ad server for how selling and buying over RTB work.
How it works
- You switch on Scan landing pages of winning bids on a Selling SSP campaign.
- For each winning bid, the landing page is recorded with the country, device type, operating system, browser and website it served on. No IP address is stored.
- An RTB scan task opens each page through a proxy in the country it served in, on the browser profile closest to the device it served on, and with your website as the referrer, because many landing pages show a clean version to visitors who come from anywhere else.
- The scans appear in your Reports, with the same verdict, screenshot, redirect chain and findings as any other scan.
It covers the landing pages of pop, redirect, push, native and banner bids. Video bids are not covered: their click-through sits inside the VAST document, which isn’t recorded. CPM, flat-rate and direct-deal campaigns are scanned with a normal task instead.
More in the manual: Scanning RTB landing pages · SSP campaigns.
Fresh pages, sampled again
A recorded landing-page address usually carries a one-time id from the buyer. Opened hours later it often shows only the buyer’s fallback page, which would scan clean and look like “nothing wrong”. So pages are scanned while they are fresh, and the pages carrying the most wins go first.
Buyers often hand out a different landing page per visit from the same address. A repeat scan is therefore another sample of what the buyer sends, not a check whether something changed. Leave the option on for buyers you don’t know well: switching it on later starts from an empty history.
Blocking a bad bid source
Nothing is blocked automatically. When a scan finds a harmful landing page, the network refuses the bid source by hand: the buyer’s tracking address the bid came through. Every bid whose address contains it is refused on the ad servers within about five minutes, and the block can be lifted again.
That stops all traffic from that source, not one landing page, because the source rotates its landing pages and there is no narrower control. A domain that only appears further down the redirect chain can’t be blocked this way, because the ad servers never see it. Check a source’s share of your RTB revenue before you block it.
More in the manual: Acting on findings.
How to set it up
- Open RTB → Campaigns, pick the Selling tab and edit the campaign.
- Switch on Scan landing pages of winning bids and save.
- Make sure the RTB scan task runs on your platform; its settings decide how often and how many pages are scanned.
- Read the scans under Reports, and send the report link of a harmful page to whoever decides on the block.
For tags and links you do have, use the malvertising scanner and the landing page scanner; see also every finding GoAdScanner flags.
Frequently asked questions
Which RTB campaigns can be scanned?
Selling SSP campaigns, for their winning pop, redirect, push, native and banner bids. Video bids and header-bidding campaigns are not covered.
Is any visitor data stored?
Only the country, device type, operating system and browser the bid served on, and your website. No IP address.
Why does a landing page scan clean while visitors still complain?
The buyer may have shown a different page this time, or the bad page only shows in certain countries or on certain devices. Later samples may catch it.
Does GoAdScanner block buyers automatically?
No. It reports. The network refuses a bid source by hand, and that block applies to all traffic from that source.
Keep bad ads off your traffic
GoAdScanner is part of GoAdserver. Tell us what you want to scan and we switch it on for your platform, or read the full manual first.