Straight answers about header bidding
No jargon walls and no gated PDFs. Every page answers one real question a publisher actually asks, with the numbers and the trade-offs included. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
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If you are new to header bidding, these three in order will give you the whole picture in about fifteen minutes.
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1
What is header bidding?
Header bidding is an auction that runs in the browser before the ad server is called. A snippet in the page head asks several demand partners for a price at the same time, waits a fixed timeout, then passes the winning bids to the ad server as targeting values. The ad server compares them against direct-sold campaigns and picks the highest.
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2
How to set up header bidding on your site
Five steps: install the wrapper script in the page head above your ad server tags, define one ad unit per placement and map each to an ad server path, connect your demand partners with their bidder parameters, create price-priority line items in your ad server that read the wrapper's targeting keys, then verify with the debug tools that bids are arriving and matching those line items.
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3
The header bidding metrics that actually matter
Track revenue per thousand pageviews (RPM) as your primary number, then unfilled rate, viewability, bid response times by percentile, win rate per bidder, and timeout rate per bidder. CPM alone is misleading because it rises when you sell fewer impressions at better prices. Pair every yield metric with LCP and CLS so you can see what the revenue cost in user experience.
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Header bidding basics
What it is, why it beats the waterfall, and what the moving parts are called.
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What is header bidding?
A plain explanation of header bidding: what runs in the browser, what the ad server does with the bids, and why publishers left the waterfall.
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Header bidding vs waterfall: what actually changes
Waterfall mediation compared with header bidding: why sequential fallbacks are slow, and why average-CPM ranking leaves money behind.
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Running Prebid.js and Amazon TAM together
How to run Prebid.js and Amazon TAM in the same auction without doubling latency, and the common mistake of chaining them sequentially.
Read Intermediate
Setting it up
Installing the tag, defining placements and wiring it to Google Ad Manager.
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How to set up header bidding on your site
A step-by-step guide to installing header bidding: script placement, ad unit mapping, bidder setup, Ad Manager line items and how to verify it works.
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Attaching header bidding to ad slots you already have
How to add header bidding to Google Ad Manager slots that are already defined in your own page templates, without rewriting your ad code.
Read Intermediate
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Timeouts, lazy loading and how to stop ads from wrecking your LCP.
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What timeout should you set for header bidding?
How to choose a header bidding timeout, why 1,500 ms is a sane default, how to measure the trade-off, and how adaptive timeouts work.
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Does header bidding slow down your site?
What header bidding really costs in page speed, which Core Web Vitals it affects, and how to reduce the cost without giving up demand.
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Lazy loading ad slots without losing revenue
Lazy loading ad slots in practice: choosing a root margin, why directional prefetch matters, which slots to exclude, and how to judge it.
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Yield and revenue
Unfilled inventory, refresh, floors and the metrics that actually tell you something.
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The header bidding metrics that actually matter
Which header bidding metrics tell you something useful, which are vanity numbers, and how to build a baseline before you change anything.
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What to do about unfilled ad impressions
Why ad requests go unfilled and how to build a recovery cascade — PostBid, referrals, direct links and house ads — without harming user experience.
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Refreshing ad slots without wrecking your viewability
What ad refresh policy permits, why 30 seconds is the practical minimum, and how to refresh without generating unviewable impressions.
Read Intermediate
Consent and privacy
TCF 2.0, GDPR, CCPA and what happens to bidding when a user says no.
Platforms and pricing
Build versus buy, revenue share versus flat fee, and what to ask a vendor.
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Revenue share vs flat fee: how header bidding vendors charge
Header bidding pricing models compared: revenue share, flat SaaS fees and hybrids, plus how to work out your own crossover point.
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Build your own Prebid wrapper, or use a platform?
Self-hosting Prebid.js versus using a platform: the maintenance burden publishers underestimate, and the seven questions to ask a vendor.
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