Nitro Blog

Publisher Onboarding: From Scraping to Bidding

When publishers first come on board with any adtech company, there are several steps that take time as everything is put into place.

One major factor in this process is that advertising bidders first need to scrape ads.txt files to determine authorized sellers of inventory on the publisher’s website. With this information, bidders can determine which publishers they should bid on. Bidders have multiple methods they can use to scrape these files; once they have done so, the data must be parsed.

Bidders also look at a website’s history to help them determine how likely it is for ads to be viewed and clicked on. This history can include information about audience, traffic, and ads that have run successfully on the website in the past. Gathering this information helps bidders choose the correct type of ads, and to bid accordingly.

Bidding signals—information used to determine how much to bid on an ad—also take time to see any changes that were made. During this process, bids from multiple advertisers are compared, allowing the most beneficial ones for that website to be chosen. These signals also allow the performance of website inventories to be tracked, which gives helpful information for future inventory pricing.