Boosting Ad Fill Rates with Advanced Ad Prefetching: A Solution Overview
In the fast-paced world of digital advertising, ad delivery optimization is crucial to maintaining user engagement and maximizing revenue. When dealing with high traffic volumes, the risk of ads not being inserted due to server overload or request throttling becomes a real challenge. Enter Advanced Ad Prefetching, a proactive approach designed to simplify the ad insertion process and improve in-stream ad fill rates.
Problem: Delay and failure to insert ad under heavy loads
In a typical server-side advertisement insertion process for a single session:
- The ad delivery process includes a dynamic ad insertion service that detects an ad break using the SCTE-35 tag.
- The Dynamic Ad Insertion Service makes a connection to the Advertising Decision Server (ADS) to fetch ad information.
- The ad insertion service fetches ad creatives from the ad origin server and ad conditions to create the ad booth.
- Advertisements are integrated into the statement and delivered to the player.
This process works smoothly for a small number of sessions, but as session sizes and concurrent requests increase, the ad and ad insertion service sometimes fails to deliver ads to certain sessions within the limited time available. These missed insertions result in a lower ad fill rate.
Solution: Advanced ad prefetching
Many dynamic ad insertion (DAI) services have a basic prefetching mechanism. For example, Google Ads Manager (GAM) offers global prefetching, where you can specify the “initial ad request duration.” However, ad duration may vary, which may result in inflated or insufficient ad prefetch. For accurate prefetching, DAI needs to know the exact ad duration along with basic targeting information.
This solution leverages AWS MediaLive (EML) as the ABR distribution encoder, GAM as the DAI service, and Freewheel as the ADS. The solution uses Early Ad Break Notification (EABN), an API provided by GAM. By giving advance notice to the ad insertion system of upcoming ad breaks, EABN facilitates higher demand and improves ad fill rates.
A similar solution can be applied to other services, provided that certain requirements are met:
- Supports SCTE-250 distribution encoder (ESAM).
- The DAI service provides an Application Programming Interface (API) for notifying upcoming ad breaks. For example, AWS MediaTailor (EMT) offerings. CreatePrefetchSchedule API
This solution takes advantage of the encoding and packaging delay inherent in content delivery. During testing, it was observed that the DAI service could receive an early warning of upcoming ads ranging from 6 to 15 seconds. This advance notice allows sufficient time to arrange VAST requests to the Ad Decision Server (ADS), tailor ads, and create the ad pod. As a result, ad fill rates improved by 10% to more than 15% during high concurrent viewing periods. The early warning timeout may vary depending on the specific configuration and system setup.
Advertisement prefetching process
- Ad Tag Detection (Step 1): When AWS MediaLive (EML) detects an ad break tag, it sends an ESAM (Event Signaling and Management) message to the ESAM handler.
- SCTE-35 Signal Processing (Step 2): The ESAM processor decodes the SCTE-35 signal (base64 encoded), retrieves the announcement duration and other metadata, and sends a “NOOP” response back to the EML.
- EABN Call (Step 3): The ESAM processor sends an API call to GAM, including ad duration, SCTE-35 signal, and other custom parameters for ad targeting, such as Content Origin Identifier (CAID).
- Proactive Ad Preparation (Step 4 to 8): GAM requests ads from Freewheel, and proactively sets up ads for all active sessions. This distributed setting reduces loading spikes during the actual ad break, resulting in higher ad fill rates and a smoother user experience.
Key considerations
- Automation: The process is fully automated without any manual intervention, ensuring smooth operation during the live broadcast.
- Failure handling: In the event of any failure in the EABN workflow, the standard ad insertion process continues unaffected.
- Testing and configuration: Robust testing and proper configuration of AWS MediaLive and GAM is critical to ensuring the solution is effective in many scenarios.
Technical requirements
To implement this solution, you need:
- Essam’s processor: A service for decoding SCTE-35 signals and handling EABN API calls.
- GAM configuration: Set up Google Ad Manager to recognize EABN API calls.
- AWS Media Live: Configure AWS MediaLive to send ESAM messages as part of the ad break format.
conclusion
Early notification of ad breaks is an effective solution for ad delivery, especially in high-traffic environments. By proactively managing ad break notifications, the system prepares ads in advance, reducing missed opportunities and dramatically improving ad fill rates.
Abbreviations:
- ABR: Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming
- ADS: Advertising Decision Server
- CAID: Content Origin Identifier
- DAI: Dynamic ad insertion
- EABN: Early Ad Break Notice
- EML: OS Medialife
- ESAM: Event Signaling and Management, SCTE-250
- GAM: Google Ads Manager
- SCTE-35: Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers standard for advertisement insertion
[Editor’s note: This is a contributed article from Ankur Patel. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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