Writing a bidder to listen to bid requests from exchanges, and to bid on those requests to win impressions has numerous challenges, from functional to technical.

One area that has kept technical teams on their toes is detection of fake traffic and rejecting those requests at the edge. Early detection and mitigation is important to save your dollar from fraud. While there are many ways of mitigating fraud, this blog talks about a concept our engineers implemented which has been very effective and cost effective to fight fraud. We call it the Bidder Pixel .

How does Bidder Pixel work ?

When sending a bid to the exchange, win notifications are received from exchanges either using notification URL or through the ADM tag which carries a pixel from the DSP. These notifications typically land into backend reporting infrastructure for further processing that may be near real time for fraud detection and offline for deep reporting and analytics.

Besides using post-bid / post-win data for fraud control, our platform fires a bidder pixel into ADM tag every time we send a bid response. This bidder pixel fires back into the bidder itself rather than to backend infrastructure.

Advantages of bidder pixel

Bidder pixel firing back to the geo distributed bidder infrastructure enables us to collect data in real time , store it into in-memory data store and use it right at the edge, all in milliseconds. This avoids any possible reporting and processing delays coming from backend infrastructure where NURL and ADM pixels are fired. Our bidder pixel helps us address some important fraud issues. Did your ad serve on a real device? Was the IP address and user agent in the original bid request same as the one received from bidder pixel?

Our bidder pixel has several other uses besides fraud mitigation. Contact us if you are interested in learning more about our efforts to fight the RTB fraud.