What is a Prebid wrapper?

This post was most recently updated on July 12th, 2019

To understand what a Prebid wrapper is you first need to understand the fundamental building blocks like header bidding, Prebid and header wrappers.

What is header bidding?

Before header bidding was widely used as it is today, publishers relied on techniques such as water falling to optimize their ad stacks. Waterfalling creates a bidding priority between ad networks and places them in a hierarchy.

Impression rates were based on historical values and not real time. As a result, publishers often did not earn the highest yield and the highest bidder did not always win the impression.

Header bidding changed all that. By placing the header code within a publisher’s web page head section, publishers could allow ad networks to bid for impressions in real time.

No more preferential treatment as with waterfalling which means that each ad impression gets sold at the highest possible rate. This results in a dramatic increase of publisher ad revenues.

What is Prebid?

Now that you have a better understanding of header bidding, what is Prebid then? Prebid is an open-source ad server and essentially free header bidding solution for publishers. It boasts of one of the largest repositories of header bidding adapters, comes with tools and much more.

Keep in mind that although Prebid is open source, it will still cost publisher money to implement the solution on their website as there are developer costs involved. Be get a detailed overview of header bidding solution implementation costs we found a guide here.

What is a header bidding wrapper?

In the early days of header bidding, big names like Amazon and Criteo who wanted to enter the header bidding market each had a separate header bidding solution. This meant that for each ad networking or header bidding partner you wanted to add to your website, you needed an individual set up.

This meant tons of dev work for publishers, higher costs and page loading issues with the auctions hampering the performance of their sites. Header wrappers were introduced to solve this issue.

Instead of having multiple header bidding solutions a publisher would use a header bidding wrapper that would enable them to integrate a range of supported ad networks and demand partners all in one environment.

This meant less time and money needed to set up header bidding, increase demand, and manage the auction timeouts.

What is a Prebid wrapper?

This brings us to a Prebid wrapper. Since you now understand that Prebid is an open source header bidding ad server, a Prebid wrapper is a header bidding wrapper built with Prebid. Utilizing a Prebid wrapper, publishers can gain more control of their header bidding with testing environments, demand partner management and auction dynamics that increase yield and scale publisher revenue.

These include popular demand partners like AppNexus, AOL, OpenX, Rubicon, Sovrn, TripleLift and many more. You can see all the demand partners here: http://prebid.org/

Conclusion

Prebid wrappers are just a small part of the header bidding puzzle. To find out whether you should consider implementing Prebid or MonetizeMore’s PubGuru header bidding solution and compare costs as well as performance, book your free consultation with MonetizeMore today!