Bidding with In-House Mediation

Bidding Kit Server

In-house mediation is not publicly available

In-house bidding with Audience Network is currently in Closed Beta and is not publicly available. We'll provide further updates if this changes.

As an alternative, you can access Audience Network Bidding through one of the mediation platforms we partner with.

In the Bidding Kit Server section:

What is it?

Facebook Audience Network’s Bidding Kit Server is an auction server for publishers currently using bidding or planning to integrate bidding. The Server handles all aspects of auction and real time bidding. It can be integrated into your existing monetization stack.

Bidding Kit Server:

  • Integrates with multiple bidders, increasing auction density.
  • Runs the auction and chooses the auction winner.
  • Notifies bidders with ad lifecycle events.

Bidding Kit Server does NOT:

  • Work with client-only demand sources.
  • Work with DSPs (Demand Side Platforms).
  • Cater to web supply.
  • Render ads. You must integrate with a Demand Source SDK (for example, FAN SDK) to render ads.

What are the Benefits?

With Bidding Kit Server, Audience Network has responded to some of the key challenges facing in-house publishers when integrating and managing bidding. In particular, Bidding Kit Server addresses the following pain points:

  • Demand Density - publishers are often connected to only 1 or 2 real-time bidders. This directly affects publisher yield (measured as ARPDAU from ads), because yield is increased in dense, competitive auctions.
  • Onboarding - publishers can find it challenging to implement auctions, unify bidding and waterfall, and integrate with various real-time bidders.
  • Scale - In-house mediation is difficult to scale without an off-the-shelf solution, because each integration requires a high degree of customization, making it costly to support.

Bidding Kit Server also provides advantages over the current client-side solution Bidding Kit 2:

  • Easy rollout - a server-side auction server essentially means that any improvements and bug fixes can be rolled out very quickly with a 0-1 rollout.
  • Saves client-side bandwidth - server-to-server bidding helps save end-user bandwidth by moving all bidder network calls to the server.
  • Bid protection - server-to-server bidding is much more secure than client-to-server bidding. Audience Network aims to ensure that bids are protected from scraping attacks, enhancing security for bidders, and prevent publishers from being exposed to bad actors impersonating them.

Process Flow


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  1. BKS receives a bid request from the caller. This can be either a publisher server or BK3. The request contains information about bidders. Optionally, the request contains information about waterfall entries, if any in the current auction.
  2. BKS parses and validates the request.
  3. BKS creates independent bid requests for all the bidders present in the request. In doing so BKS looks up the config.
  4. BKS makes https bid requests to all the bidders and collects responses.
  5. BKS merges the responses with waterfall entries, if any were passed in the request.
  6. BKS responds back to the caller list of bidders (and waterfall entries, if any), sorted according to their price.
  7. BKS sends auction win loss notifications to all the bidders with the clearing price of the auction
  8. The caller calls BKS for displayNotification request.
  9. BKS sends another win/loss notification to the bidders that were a part of the auction with the display notification.

Architecture

BKS Internal Modules

QPS (Queries per Second)

Bidding Kit Server can handle up to 400 QPS, with error rate less than 0.001% and 99% of the requests responded to in less than 1491ms.

Testing was done on a AWS EC2 instance: AMI: Amazon Linux AMI 2018.03.0 (HVM), SSD Volume Type; instance type: t2.large)

See Also