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Understand Equativ's Unified Auction system

Overview

This document explains how to access demand sources and how Equativ's Unified Auction system optimizes revenue for publishers and inventory suppliers across all demand sources and monetization channels.

Unified Auction

The Unified Auction is a system that optimizes demand sources to maximize revenue. For every ad opportunity, the system retrieves the highest bid while ensuring the delivery of guaranteed commitments.

Demand sources

Inventory suppliers can access various demand sources to then optimize them for maximum revenues across all demand sources.   

Guaranteed demand

With guaranteed demand, a buyer purchases a specific volume of ad impressions from the inventory supplier. The supplier commits to reserving and serving these impressions, typically at a fixed, CPM-based price.

Guaranteed demand is either direct or programmatic:

Equativ SSP demand

Equativ's SSP allows inventory suppliers to access demand from partners integrated directly into the platform. Publishers declare the inventory they want to monetize and access demand through open auctions, private auctions, and preferred deals.

This demand type doesn't involve impression volume commitments or inventory reservations. Equativ usually retains a CPM-based share of the revenue generated from Equativ SSP demand.

For more information, see Activate open auctions and Create private auction and preferred deal (new workflow).

Third-party SSP demand

Inventory suppliers can also integrate third-party SSPs. In this case, the supplier has a direct contractual relationship with the third party. Revenue flows directly from the third-party SSP to the supplier, and Equativ doesn't take a revenue share.

You can access third-party SSP demand in three ways:

  • Third-party OpenRTB demand: The OpenRTB protocol is used to request and receive bids. The integration is a manual process managed by Equativ's partner integration teams. The process involves mapping Equativ site IDs to the partner's inventory entities. During bidding, the inventory entities are matched and sent in the imp.app.siteId OpenRTB field. In Instant Insights, you can report on these partners using the Partner dimension. They follow the naming pattern "[Partner name] - EB".
    The following list contains some of the partners currently integrated:
    • AdAlliance - EB
    • Index Exchange - EB
    • Nexxen - EB
    • OpenX - EB
    • Pubmatic - EB
    • PubmaticV2 - EB
    • Triplelift - EB

For more information, see Monetize with Open RTB partners.  

  • Third-party video demand: Partners are integrated using the VAST standard. A VAST wrapper acts as a redirect to call the partner. This demand is managed in the Equativ Monetization Platform UI. For more information, see Set up Video Ad Exchange: get started.
  • Third-party header bidding demand: Suppliers add partners to the header auction and manage them in two ways:
    • Client-side management: Third-party SSPs, floor prices and other settings are configured directly in the prebid.js library. For more information, see Monetize with prebid.js partners.
    • Managed service: Third-party SSPs, floor prices and other settings are configured in the Equativ Monetization Platform UI to manage prebid.js partners. For more information, see Monetize with prebid.js partners (managed service).