What is Third-Party Ad Serving?

Third-party ad serving happens when you visit a website like allaboutcookies.org where the content of the site comes from the site, but the ads come from another server or website. Your browser assembles the information fed from the differing sources so all items appear on the same page. 

For your browser to assemble the ads correctly, the website directs your browser to collect information from a different site's ad server. The third-party website creates a cookie in your browser's folder as a result. Read on to learn more about third-party ad serving and how it affects your browsing experience.

Why do websites use third-party ad serving?

Many websites, especially those providing free information or content, depend on advertising to continue operations. Many of these sites don't have the technical and business development infrastructure to recruit their own advertiser accounts and serve their own ads.

As a result, they rely on third-party advertisement serving companies to recruit advertisers and serve those ads on publishers' sites. Third-party ad serving companies can provide the server space, campaign delivery, and reporting facilities that the websites need.

This arrangement allows websites to focus on what they do best and save time and money.

Do all websites use third-party ad serving?

No, not all websites use third-party advertising. Many websites use first-party ad serving (in which they select the ads to feature) and/or a combination of first- and third-party ad serving. Deciding which advertising avenue to rely on depends on the website's marketing strategies and goals.

Cookies and their role

Third-party ad serving cookies solve many problems that generally arise when the website's visitor loads content from the website, but the ads come from another site. Cookies help the ad serving website with the following:

• Cookies limit the number of times an ad is shown. This function is particularly handy when dealing with potentially annoying advertising forms like pop-up ads. Cookies ensure that a popup only shows up once per visit.
• Some ads are more effective when shown in a particular order or sequence. By helping the website you're viewing remember the pages you've visited during your browsing session, cookies enable ads to appear in a particular order.
• Advertisers need to know how often their ads were shown on the publisher's websites. Cookies allow third-party ad-serving websites to collect this information.
• Cookies allow advertisers to track how many people visited the advertiser's websites through a click or a response on the ads shown by third-party ad serving companies on publishers' websites. This feature helps the ad serving company and the advertiser determine if a particular campaign produced the desired results.

Third-party cookies help advertising campaigns

Third-party ad serving companies provide useful, cost-effective services to websites that cannot manage advertising campaigns in-house. Advertisers like cookies to be used in the delivery of campaigns because they enable the following to happen without any personal information being collected:

• Cookies limit the number of times that an advertisement is shown. This is particularly useful if pop-up ads are used, as cookies can ensure the same browser is not shown the same pop-up over and over again.
• Enable a sequence of advertisements to be shown in the correct order.
• Calculate how many unique web visitors have been shown an advertisement.
• Calculate how many unique people visited a site as a direct response to an advertisement.

Bottom line

While some cookies are downright helpful at optimizing your browsing experience, others are annoying or even harmful. A convenient way to help manage your cookies is using a top ad blocker that helps stop tracking cookies. Premium ad blockers can also stop malicious files, unwanted ads, and more.