Comments on: RTB Part III — Cookies & User Data

By: NandhiniPadhu

NandhiniPadhu — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:18:07 +0000

Hi Mike,

This information is very useful for me.

-Nandhini

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 14:43:52 +0000

Hi Matt,

They’re actually two completely separate processes. You’ll see these sync pixels tacked on to a large number of ads you see on the internet today but are disconnected from the actual real-time process.

-Mike

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 09:58:33 +0000

Thanks Mike for this quick answer!
One more question : how is it done?
is there 2 scripts in the page : first one to sync cookies, second one to load the ad?

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:22:20 +0000

Hi Matt,

No there’s not because the cookie syncing process actually happens *before* the actual RTB bid requests. There is a problem of too many pixels on too many web pages, but that’s an entirely different one!

-Mike

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:19:59 +0000

Great explanations !
But, is there a speed problem here? If many bidders are competing for the same ad, and requiring to sync cookies with the exchange, there will be a lot of requests between servers and browser before the ad is actually served

By: Paysage Français de l'e-Publicité Comportementale » RTB Part III — Cookies & User Data

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:40:46 +0000

[...] A number of people have asked about how cookie matching works in the RTB world. Everybody today reli… [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:04:10 +0000

Eran — Great question.

From a coverage & tech perspective having the seller store the UID is far more efficient. If the seller drops a sync pixel on every ad call it means that there’s near 100% sync between the two parties. Additionally, sending the buyers UID to him means that he only has to do *one* read on the database instead of two. This might sound small, but at 100k RPS, adding 100k lookups actually has an impact on performance.

From a privacy perspective… I’m not sure… call your legal council? I feel like either way there’s a privacy problem in that lots of companies are conglomerating large cookie pools.

Jerry –

The question I have to ask you back is — what technology platform are you using? If you are using a buying platform that is hooked into all the exchanges then in theory all you do is have bluekai stamp segments on the platform and then they are automatically available for buying across all exchanges. If you have no technology platform them you’d have to have bluekai stamp each individual exchange or run your own pixel-server and piggyback exchange pixels to broadcast this data to each individual exchange.

The data providers themselves are also integrating with the exchanges to make buying their data easier — but that’s a whole separate topic.

By: Eran

Eran — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:11:14 +0000

Mike, can you talk about the pros / cons of the 2 different approaches? i.e Privacy conern, ease of manipulation without having to re-map, etc.

By: DAVE HONIG

DAVE HONIG — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 03:37:57 +0000

Excellent Mike!

By: Jerry

Jerry — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:55:16 +0000

Wait! Let me reask the question.

I go out and buy a bunch of Bluekai cookies, corresponding to a specific segment (travel intenders, say). Then I go to an exchange and tell the exchange I only want users who correspond to that segment.

How does the exchange do this? Are they already synched with Bluekai?