Getting started with Unity Exchange#

How it works#

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of online advertising space. Automation makes transactions efficient, streamlining the process of digital advertising buying and selling. The process is possible because of the nature of standardized advertising placements and sizes, such as video and banner placements.

Programmatic advertising also can leverage technological advancements of data platforms to help target specific audiences, and allows for up to the minute optimizations of the campaign to help reach advertiser key performance indicators.

Overview#

A publishing app submits an ad request to Unity’s exchange, where DSPs can submit a bid for the impression. If the bid wins the auction, Unity pre-caches the ad and only renders it when the user views the ad. At this point, an impression and all other trackers are counted.

1. Unity receives an ad request from a mobile device.
2. Unity makes an HTTP POST request to all bidding partner endpoints.
3. For waterfall auctions, TMAX is configurable by the DSP seat, up to 1000ms. For bidding auctions, TMAX is configured by the mediation platform; 50ms is deducted from Unity's processing time. In both scenarios, the DSP's time to respond is communicated in the bid request.
4. Unity's Exchange runs a first-price auction based on valid bidder responses.
5. Upon completing the auction, Unity retrieves the winning bid’s HTML and impression trackers to the client for pre-caching.
6. When the player experiences the ad, Unity pings the winning bidder’s nURL to notify the DSP of the impression.
7. The creative renders to the end user, and Unity fires other event trackers along with the creative payload.

Requirements#

To participate in Unity Exchange, review the following criteria:

• Support for OpenRTB 2.5.

• Support for bURL or imptracker.

• Partners implementing Unity’s version of OpenRTB must have sufficient development resources to provide the following:

  • Support for all required fields, for both the request and response
  • Creative asset validation
  • Discrepancy monitoring