How does tracking/billing works for media buying from small app developers?
I'm planning to do media buying from a small app developer who seem to have good traffic in my target geo. However I'm bit concerned about billing/tracking. How do I go about it? How do you place the ads in their apps?
I'm thinking of using ad server to host my creative assets and pass the links to the app developer to use in their apps. The ad server will not only host the creatives but also track the traffic impressions/clicks that can be used for billing.
Does anybody have any experience doing this? What ad server do you recommend?
You will definitely want to use an ad server.
The developer can then just place your ad serving tags in the appropriate spots and you're good to go.
There are lots of options - Revive, SiteScout, DFP, etc. Not sure about mobile but I am sure there are several 'mobile-optimised' ad servers out there.
For billing, you will want to bill based on your numbers and this is something that you will declare in the insertion order (IO) document that the both of you agree to.
For IOs, be sure to have clauses on how things will be tracked bills, an out clause, obligations of yourself and the developer, etc.
Thanks for the answer.
Will explore a good ad server for mobile. If anyone has any experience then feel free to recommend.
Is an Ad Server needed? If we are using companies like Decisive and AdBlade and Sitescout, etc. Does someone need an ad server?
You'd only use an AdServer when you need it, e.g. for direct media buys where you have cut the middleman like those DSPs out of the picture.
One of their advantages is that they allow you to filter traffic and auctioning based on parameters like geo, carrier, OS, etc.
If you did a full media buy you might have RoN traffic from mobile and desktop, so you need a system that can track and dynamically serve ad impressions + let you optimise based on important parameters.