Updated October 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team
Ad tech software development is the design, build and operation of the systems that buy, sell, serve and measure digital advertising: bidding engines, supply and yield tools, ad servers, exchanges, audience data services and the reporting and billing behind them. It is for ad tech and martech companies, publishers and media owners, agencies and brands building in-house tools, and founders launching an advertising product, and it produces a platform that answers partners on time, spends budgets exactly and reconciles every impression to an invoice. Progression Agency is based in New York City and works with clients across the United States and worldwide.
On this page · 16 sections
- What is adtech and how does it work?
- Which adtech platforms do we build, and who commissions them?
- Adtech software development services, from first sketch to on-call
- Programmatic advertising platform development: the modules a bidding platform needs
- Adtech architecture: building for latency, volume and money
- Privacy, consent and identity built into the platform
- Supply chain transparency: ads.txt, app-ads.txt and sellers.json
- Video, connected TV and header bidding modules
- Martech software development next to adtech
- Build, buy or extend an ad platform?
- Ad tech consulting before a single line of code
- How ad tech platform development runs, phase by phase
- What drives adtech software development cost?
- How do you choose an adtech development company?
- How do AI assistants answer questions about ad tech software development?
- Related services
The short answerAn adtech development company scopes the platform type and its partners, designs a low-latency architecture, builds a minimum viable product against one real traffic source, then adds integrations, measurement and billing before load and security testing. Success is measured in responses returned inside each partner’s time limit, pacing accuracy, discrepancy rates against partner counts, uptime and infrastructure cost per million requests. Consent and opt-out signals are designed in from the first sprint. Progression publishes no custom software price: every build is quoted after a written scope, and the timeline is agreed phase by phase.
Specifications, rules and product facts are described as published by IAB Tech Lab, IAB, IAB Europe, the California Attorney General, the European Commission, the FTC, Google, the Media Rating Council and the named open-source projects, read in October 2026; they change, and this page is general information, not legal advice. Progression publishes no custom software price; every build is quoted after a written scope.
What is adtech and how does it work?
Adtech is the software that moves an ad from a buyer’s budget to a person’s screen and proves it was seen. In a programmatic sale, the publisher’s side offers an impression, the buyer’s side prices it, an auction picks a winner, an ad server delivers the creative, and measurement tools count what happened, all in the moment the page or app loads.
| System | Which side uses it | What it does | What a build has to get right |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demand-side platform (DSP) | Advertisers and agencies | Evaluates bid requests and bids on impressions for campaigns | Bid decisions inside the timeout, budget pacing, targeting |
| Supply-side platform (SSP) | Publishers and app owners | Offers inventory to many buyers and manages floors and rules | Yield logic, demand partner connections, supply transparency |
| Ad exchange | Both sides | Runs the auction between supply and demand | Fair auction logic, throughput, clean logging |
| Ad server | Publishers or advertisers | Decides which creative to show and records delivery | Decisioning rules, counting, pacing |
| Ad network | Both sides, through an operator | Packages inventory from many sites or apps for sale | Inventory quality, payouts, reporting |
| Data management or customer data platform | Marketers and platforms | Builds audiences from first-party and partner data | Consent-aware segments, identity inputs, retention rules |
| Consent management platform | Publishers and apps | Shows the privacy notice and records the person’s choices | Signal formats partners can read |
| Measurement and attribution | Advertisers and publishers | Counts impressions, clicks and outcomes and assigns credit | Deduplication, reconciliation, honest models |
If you are an advertiser looking to buy media through a bidding platform rather than build one, that is the work of our programmatic advertising agency team; this page is for the companies that build and run the platforms themselves.
Why does the adtech landscape look so crowded?
Each step in that chain can be a separate company, and many sell to each other. A publisher may use one vendor for consent, another for header bidding, a third for ad serving and several supply partners at once. That fragmentation is why integration work, not the core algorithm, takes most of the calendar on a typical build.
Where the money moves
Every impression carries a price, and every party takes a fee, a margin or a subscription. Platform software therefore has two jobs: making decisions fast enough to win the right impressions, and keeping records exact enough that invoices, payouts and partner reports agree at month end.
Which adtech platforms do we build, and who commissions them?
We build the buy-side, sell-side and serving software described above, plus the data, measurement and admin tools around it. Most commissions come from one of five kinds of company, and each one starts from a different problem.
| Who is building | Typical platform | Usual trigger | First milestone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ad tech startup | A bidding or supply product for a niche | A founder with a pricing or data insight | One live partner with real traffic |
| Established ad tech vendor | A new module or a rebuild of an old service | Cost per request too high, or a stalled roadmap | Parallel run beside the old system |
| Publisher or media owner | An ad server, yield tool or direct-sold marketplace | Fees to intermediaries, or data kept in-house | Direct campaigns served from the new stack |
| Retailer or commerce site | Sponsored listings and on-site ad placements | A new revenue line from supplier brands | One placement type, one advertiser portal |
| Agency or brand | Trading desk tooling, reporting, creative workflow | Too much manual work across platforms | A single report that replaces spreadsheets |
Bidding platforms for the buy side
A demand-side platform (DSP) receives bid requests, decides which campaigns are eligible, prices the impression and answers before the exchange stops waiting. DSP development is mostly about that decision path and the budget controls behind it; we keep the advertiser’s media-buying questions on the programmatic buying page and focus here on the engineering.
SSP development and publisher yield tools
On the sell side, a supply-side platform (SSP) connects a publisher’s inventory to many buyers, applies floors and block lists, and passes supply chain information buyers now expect. Supply side platform development also covers the dashboards a publisher uses to see which partners pay and which only add latency.
Ad server development and ad decisioning
An ad server decides which creative appears in a placement and records that it did. Ad server development covers the decisioning rules (priority, targeting, pacing, frequency), the creative store, the counting pipeline and the trafficking screens an ad operations team uses all day.
Ad exchange development and ad network development
An exchange runs auctions between many buyers and sellers; a network aggregates inventory and resells it under its own terms. Ad exchange development puts the weight on auction rules, throughput and logging that both sides can audit, while ad network development adds publisher onboarding, payouts and inventory quality controls.
Retail media and commerce ad placements
A retailer selling sponsored product and display placements on its own site and app to the brands it stocks needs more than an ad server. Retail media platform development joins an ad server to the product catalog, the search results page and the retailer’s sales data, so suppliers can see what their ads sold.
Campaign management, trafficking and reporting tools
Not every build is a bidder. Many companies need ad management software development: order entry, creative approval, trafficking to several platforms through their APIs, and one reporting layer that replaces exports and spreadsheets.
Adtech software development services, from first sketch to on-call
Our adtech software development services cover consulting, architecture, product engineering, integrations, data and reporting, testing and the run phase after launch. You can hire the whole path or one piece, such as an architecture review or a single partner integration.
- Ad tech consulting and discovery: partners, volumes, rules, success measures, and a build, buy or extend recommendation
- Architecture and system design: service boundaries, data flow, storage choices, failure behavior and cost model
- Ad tech MVP development: one platform type, one partner, one format, running on real traffic
- Partner integrations: exchanges, supply partners, measurement vendors, consent tools and identity inputs
- Data pipelines, reporting and billing: event streams, aggregates, dashboards, invoices and payouts
- Admin and trafficking interfaces: campaign setup, creative approval, user roles and audit trails
- Load, security and failover testing before each traffic increase
- Run and improve: monitoring, on-call support, performance tuning and new specification versions
Adtech development services for an existing platform
A large share of adtech development is not greenfield. We take over services that have outgrown their first design, migrate them to new infrastructure, add a module such as a new ad format, or untangle a reporting pipeline that disagrees with partners.
Adtech product development for founders
For a new company, adtech product development starts with the narrowest product that proves the business: one buyer type, one supply source, one pricing idea. We keep that first version honest about what it cannot do yet, so investors and early customers see real traffic rather than slides.
Advertising software development around the platform
Advertising software development also includes the pieces around the core: advertiser self-serve portals, publisher onboarding, creative tools, invoicing and the internal tools an operations team needs. These often decide whether a platform can grow without hiring a person per customer.
Programmatic advertising platform development: the modules a bidding platform needs
Programmatic advertising platform development is a set of modules that each fail in their own way. The table and lists below are the checklist we start every scope from, trimmed to the platform type you are building.
| Module | What it does | What goes wrong without it |
|---|---|---|
| Bid request intake | Parses partner requests, validates fields, rejects malformed traffic | Crashes or silent drops under load |
| Eligibility and targeting | Matches campaigns to the request by geography, device, inventory and audience | Wasted bids and missed impressions |
| Bid decisioning | Values the impression and picks the creative | Overpaying, or losing every auction |
| Budget pacing | Spreads spend across the flight and stops at the cap | Budgets gone by noon, or never spent |
| Frequency capping | Limits how often one person sees one campaign | Annoyed audiences and wasted spend |
| Creative management | Stores, approves and serves ad files and tags | Broken ads and rejected creatives |
| Event logging | Records wins, impressions, clicks and conversions once each | Reports that disagree with partners |
| Reporting and attribution | Aggregates events into the numbers clients pay on | Disputes at invoice time |
| Billing and reconciliation | Turns counted delivery into invoices and payouts | Revenue leakage and manual month-end work |
| Invalid-traffic filtering | Screens out bots and suspicious traffic before and after the bid | Paying for impressions nobody saw |
| Admin and trafficking UI | Lets operations teams set up and change campaigns safely | Engineers doing campaign setup by hand |
| APIs and integrations | Connects partners, clients and internal tools | Every new partner becomes a custom project |
Real time bidding software development: answering on time
Real-time bidding lets a single impression be put up for bid as the page or app loads. In OpenRTB 2.6 the tmax field gives the maximum time in milliseconds the exchange allows for bids, including internet latency, and a late answer is simply ignored. RTB software development is therefore built backwards from that limit: what can be computed in advance, what must be read from memory and what is never allowed on the request path.
Bid request handling and OpenRTB
OpenRTB is the IAB Tech Lab’s open protocol for the automated trading of digital media, developed from 2010 by supply and demand technology companies. Version 2.6 dates from November 2022 and uses AdCOM 1.0 lists; version 3.0, from April 2022, arrived with the companion Advertising Common Object Model (AdCOM). We support whichever version your launch partners send, with an adapter for each partner’s extensions.
Budget pacing, frequency caps and the cost of a wrong count
Pacing decides how fast a campaign spends; capping decides how often one person sees it. Both depend on shared counters that many servers update at once, which is where most overspend incidents start. We design those counters so a slow or failed service makes the platform bid less, never more.
Invalid-traffic filtering as a module
Filtering runs before the bid, using block lists and request checks, and after it, using patterns in the event logs. The Media Rating Council publishes Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines, with an IVT 2.0 addendum updated in June 2020; we build the hooks that verification vendors and your own rules plug into.
Billing, reconciliation and discrepancy handling
Two systems counting the same campaign rarely agree to the impression. The platform needs its own event of record, a daily comparison with each partner’s numbers and clear rules for which count an invoice uses. Building that early saves weeks of month-end arguments later.
Ready to scope an ad platform build?Send the platform type, the partners it must connect to and the volume you expect in year one. You get a free proposal with a written scope, a phase plan and the questions we still need answered, with a same-business-day reply.
Adtech architecture: building for latency, volume and money
Adtech architecture is the design of a system that handles a very large number of small, time-limited requests while money moves through it. The right shape keeps the request path short, pushes heavy work to streams and batch jobs, and makes every failure safe for budgets.
| Layer | Common building blocks | Question we answer in the scope |
|---|---|---|
| Edge and request path | Stateless services in a compiled or JIT language, regional deployment | How close to each partner must we run? |
| Fast state | In-memory key-value stores for budgets, caps and profiles | What must be readable in a few milliseconds? |
| Event streaming | A distributed log such as Apache Kafka | How do wins, impressions and clicks reach every consumer once? |
| Analytics storage | A column-oriented database such as ClickHouse | Which reports must be fresh, and which can wait an hour? |
| Batch and models | Scheduled jobs, feature stores, bid models | What can be computed ahead of the request? |
| Control plane | Admin APIs, campaign database, user roles | Who can change what, and how is it audited? |
| Observability | Metrics, logs, traces, alerting | Which alerts mean money is at risk right now? |
Low-latency services on the request path
Anything a bid needs is prepared before the request arrives: campaign lists, targeting indexes, model outputs. The request path reads from memory, computes a price and answers. Database calls, synchronous calls to other teams’ services and heavy logging stay off that path.
Streaming data pipelines
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform, and it or a managed equivalent is a common backbone for ad events. The design choices that matter are partitioning, ordering, retention and how each consumer recovers after a crash without double counting.
Event storage and reporting
Delivery data is wide, append-heavy and queried by time and dimension, which suits analytical databases. ClickHouse describes itself as a column-oriented SQL database management system for online analytical processing; similar engines exist, and we pick by query shape, team skills and hosting preference.
Horizontal scaling and cost per million requests
Traffic in adtech arrives from partners, not from your own users, so it can double when one partner turns on a new region. We track infrastructure cost per million requests from the first load test and design autoscaling, request sampling and partner throttling so growth does not arrive as a surprise invoice.
Observability that maps to money
Dashboards show bid rate, win rate, timeout rate, spend against pace and discrepancy by partner. Alerts fire on the conditions that cost money, such as a campaign spending faster than plan or a partner’s timeout rate rising, rather than on every server metric.
Privacy, consent and identity built into the platform
An ad platform has to read, store, respect and pass on people’s privacy choices on every request. We build platforms inside the rules below; this section is general information, not legal advice, and your counsel decides how each rule applies to you.
| Rule or signal | What it is | What the platform does with it |
|---|---|---|
| GDPR (EU) | EU law on personal data; cookie IDs, IP addresses and phone advertising identifiers can be personal data | Reads consent signals, limits processing to what was agreed, supports deletion |
| CCPA as amended by CPRA (California) | Gives people the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information | Stops sale and sharing for opted-out users and keeps that state |
| Global Privacy Control | A browser setting or extension that sends an opt-out signal to sites | Treats the signal as an opt-out where the law requires it |
| IAB Europe TCF | A voluntary industry standard for recording and passing consent choices | Parses consent strings and checks vendor permissions |
| IAB Tech Lab GPP | A protocol carrying privacy, consent and choice signals from sites and apps to vendors | Reads the sections for each jurisdiction |
| COPPA (United States) | FTC rule on collecting personal information from children under 13 | Keeps child-directed traffic out of targeted bidding |
GDPR and EU traffic
The European Commission’s GDPR guidance lists an IP address, a cookie ID and a phone’s advertising identifier as examples of personal data, and says the law reaches companies outside the EU that offer goods or services to people in the EU or monitor their behavior. Under the regulation, consent has to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous, which is why the platform stores what each person agreed to, not just that a banner was shown.
CCPA, CPRA and opt-out preference signals
The California Attorney General’s CCPA page explains that sharing means sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising, that people may opt out of sale and sharing, and that a user-enabled global privacy control must be honored by covered businesses as a valid request. CPRA amended the CCPA rather than replacing it, with its provisions in effect from January 1, 2023. Coverage depends on thresholds such as more than $25 million in annual gross revenue or buying, selling or sharing the personal information of 100,000 or more California residents or households.
Consent strings: TCF and GPP
IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework is a voluntary standard; version 2.3 launched in April 2025, and participants had until February 28, 2026 to adopt it. IAB Tech Lab’s Global Privacy Platform carries strings for the IAB Europe TCF, the IAB Canada TCF, a US national string and a number of US state strings in one container. A platform built today parses both and records which version arrived.
Identity after the Privacy Sandbox retirement
On October 17, 2025, Google said it would retire several Privacy Sandbox technologies, including Topics, Protected Audience and the Attribution Reporting API on Chrome and Android, citing low adoption, and that Chrome keeps its current approach of offering users a choice about third-party cookies. Identity inputs therefore stay plural: first-party IDs, contextual signals and frameworks such as UID2, whose component source code is public and which people can opt out of at any time through its Transparency and Control Portal.
Adult audiences only, and COPPA
We build platforms for advertising to adults. The FTC’s COPPA guidance covers operators of sites and services directed to children under 13 and treats a persistent identifier that recognizes a user over time as personal information, including when an ad network collects it to serve targeted ads. Our designs keep child-directed inventory out of targeted bidding and do not build audiences of children or teens.
Supply chain transparency: ads.txt, app-ads.txt and sellers.json
Buyers now check who is allowed to sell an impression before they bid on it, so supply chain files are part of the platform, not a publisher chore. Your system has to read them, keep them fresh and act on what they say.
ads.txt and app-ads.txt
ads.txt stands for Authorized Digital Sellers; its stated mission is more transparency in programmatic advertising. app-ads.txt extends the same idea to mobile and connected apps to fight inventory fraud. A buy-side platform crawls these files and declines requests from sellers a publisher has not listed.
sellers.json and the SupplyChain object
sellers.json lets buyers discover the entities that sell or resell inventory, and together with the OpenRTB SupplyChain object it identifies every party that touched a bid request. Sell-side builds publish the file; buy-side builds read it and score supply paths.
Supply path choices
Once the files are in place, the platform can prefer direct paths, drop resellers that add cost without adding reach and show advertisers where their money went. That reporting is often what a client asks about first.
Video, connected TV and header bidding modules
Video and connected TV add formats, players and server-side insertion to the stack, and publishers’ header bidding adds a client-side auction before the ad server. Each arrives with its own specification to follow.
VAST for video ads
IAB’s Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) structures the ad tags that serve ads to video players and carries the ad’s metadata from the ad server to the player. A video build parses, wraps and validates VAST responses and records the player events that prove delivery.
Header bidding development with Prebid
Prebid is a free, fully open-source header bidding suite: Prebid.js runs in the browser, and Prebid Server moves the auction to a server for places such as mobile apps where browser headers are not available. Header bidding development usually means adapters, analytics modules and server configuration rather than a new auction from scratch.
Connected TV measurement
The Media Rating Council lists OTT/CTV and server-side ad insertion measurement guidelines from August 2021 among its standards. CTV builds pay particular attention to device identifiers, household-level frequency and the gap between a server-side insert and a confirmed play.
Martech software development next to adtech
Martech software development builds the tools marketers use with people who already know the brand: customer data platforms, journey and email tools, attribution and analytics. Martech development often shares data pipelines with adtech, which is why we scope them together when both are on the roadmap.
The difference between adtech and martech
Adtech mostly deals with paid media and people who have not yet given you their details; martech mostly deals with your own customers, prospects and channels. The line blurs where first-party audiences are pushed into paid media or ad results feed customer records, and that is where consent records have to travel with the data.
Attribution software development
Attribution tools join ad events to outcomes and assign credit. The hard parts are identity matching within consent limits, deduplicating conversions across platforms and explaining the model in a way finance accepts. We build the pipeline and the reporting; the model choice stays visible and adjustable.
Customer data and journey tools
When the product is a customer data or journey tool, our CRM development and marketing automation software pages describe the neighboring builds; this page covers the parts that touch advertising data.
Inherited an ad server or bidder nobody wants to touch?Share read access to the repository and a week of incident notes. You get a free proposal for a code and architecture review, a stabilization plan and a handover path, with a same-business-day reply.
Build, buy or extend an ad platform?
Build when the bidding, pricing or data logic is the product you sell; buy or license when ad serving is a supporting function; extend an existing or open-source base when you need standard features now and custom logic later. Our custom software versus off-the-shelf guide sets out the general decision framework.
When is an existing ad server the right start?
A publisher selling direct campaigns on a handful of sites rarely needs a custom ad server on day one. A licensed product, or a free open-source system such as Revive Adserver, which publishes its source code, can run those campaigns while custom work goes into the reporting or marketplace layer that sets the business apart.
When does a custom build pay for itself?
Custom builds make sense when per-impression or revenue-share fees grow faster than the business, when your pricing or audience logic is the reason customers choose you, or when a vendor’s roadmap blocks a product you need to ship.
The extend path
Many platforms start on open-source components such as Prebid Server and add proprietary modules around them. That path ships sooner but ties you to the project’s release cycle, so we plan upgrades into the run budget from the start.
Ad tech consulting before a single line of code
Ad tech consulting is a short, paid discovery that turns an idea into a scope: who the partners are, what volume to expect, which rules apply, what success means and whether to build at all. It is the cheapest point at which to change direction.
Adtech consulting services we run
Typical adtech consulting services include architecture reviews of an existing platform, partner and specification audits, cost-per-request reviews of cloud bills, privacy-signal mapping with your counsel, and technical due diligence for investors looking at an ad tech company.
| Deliverable | What it contains | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Partner map | Every exchange, supply partner, vendor and client system the platform touches | Engineering and business development |
| Volume and latency model | Expected requests, peaks, regions and partner timeouts | Architecture and finance |
| Rules register | Privacy laws, consent signals, supply chain files and partner policies to honor | Product, counsel, engineering |
| Architecture outline | Services, data flow, storage and failure behavior | Engineering and investors |
| Build, buy or extend recommendation | Which parts to build, license or adopt, and why | Founders and executives |
| Written scope and phase plan | Features per phase, acceptance tests and the quote | Everyone signing off |
Technical due diligence on an ad tech company
Investors and acquirers ask us to read the code, the infrastructure and the incident history of an ad tech business. The report covers how the platform scales, where cost per request is heading, how consent is handled and what it would take to replace key people.
How ad tech platform development runs, phase by phase
Ad tech platform development moves through discovery, architecture, a minimum viable product on real traffic, integrations, hardening and the run phase. Each phase ends with a demonstration against agreed tests, and durations are set in the written scope rather than promised up front.
Ad tech MVP development on real traffic
The first version runs against one partner and one format with a small, controlled share of traffic. That proves the request path, the counting and the budget controls under real conditions before more partners are connected.
Integrations and the long tail of partner quirks
Each partner adds its own extensions, timeouts, reporting formats and test process. We budget integration time per partner and keep a shared adapter layer so the tenth integration costs less than the second.
Hardening: load, security and failover
Before traffic grows, we replay recorded request shapes at several times expected volume, test what happens when a store or a region fails, and run security reviews of the admin interfaces and APIs. The reports are yours to keep and show to partners.
Running and improving the platform
After launch the work becomes on-call, tuning, new specification versions and features. You can keep us on a run retainer, hand over to your own team with runbooks, or mix the two. Our DevOps services page covers the infrastructure side in depth.
What drives adtech software development cost?
We do not publish a price for ad tech software development, because the range between a reporting tool and a multi-region bidder is too wide for one number to help. Every build is quoted after a written scope that names the platform type, the partners, the volume and the phases.
| Driver | Why it moves the quote | How to reduce it |
|---|---|---|
| Platform type | A bidder, an exchange and a reporting tool differ in components and risk | Start with the narrowest product that proves the business |
| Number of partners | Each integration has its own format, tests and certification steps | Launch with one or two, add the rest in later phases |
| Traffic volume and regions | More regions mean more infrastructure, testing and on-call | Launch in one region, measure cost per million requests |
| Latency targets | Tighter limits require more precomputation and memory | Use each partner’s real timeout, not a guess |
| Privacy scope | More jurisdictions mean more signals to parse and test | Map signals with counsel before design |
| Reporting and billing depth | Invoices and payouts need audit-grade counting | Agree the event of record early |
| Existing code | Takeovers start with reading, testing and stabilizing | Share the repository and incident history in discovery |
Infrastructure, data and partner fees are billed by their providers and sit outside our quote; we model them in discovery so the total cost of running the platform is visible before you commit.
How do you choose an adtech development company?
Choose the partner that can show evidence of systems that held up under load, that puts the code and the cloud accounts in your name, and that talks about budgets, consent and reconciliation before it talks about frameworks.
| Requirement | How to check it |
|---|---|
| Experience with high-volume, low-latency systems | Ask for load-test reports and architecture diagrams from earlier work, with names removed |
| Knows the specifications | Ask which OpenRTB version and extensions they would support first, and why |
| Safe budget behavior | Ask what happens to spend when a counter store goes down mid-flight |
| Privacy designed in | Ask how consent strings and opt-out signals are parsed, stored and passed on |
| Code ownership | Confirm the repository, cloud accounts and keys are in your name from day one |
| Security practice | Ask how secrets are stored, how admin access is granted and how dependencies are patched |
| Honest scoping | Expect a paid discovery and a written scope before any total price |
| Exit terms | Read the handover clause: documentation, runbooks, knowledge transfer and notice period |
Adtech software companies versus general software firms
Specialist adtech software companies know the vocabulary and the partners; general firms may bring stronger product and infrastructure practice. Either can work if the team on your project has run latency-bound, high-volume systems and can show it.
Questions to ask in the first call
Which part of this would you advise us not to build? What did your last load test find? Who on the team has been on call for a system that moves money? How would you hand this over if we hired our own engineers next year?
How do AI assistants answer questions about ad tech software development?
Founders and product leads now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI Overviews questions such as which companies build ad servers, how to build a bidding platform or what an adtech development company should cost. The answers draw on pages that explain the work plainly and specifically.
What those assistants tend to cite
For technical questions they lean on specification bodies (IAB Tech Lab, IAB Europe), regulators, project documentation and detailed engineering guides. For vendor questions they lean on service pages with clear scope, comparison tables, case material the vendor is allowed to publish and independent directories and reviews.
What an ad tech company should publish to be named
If you sell an ad platform, the same rules apply to you: a plain description of what the product does and for whom, documentation that names the specifications you support, a public ads.txt or sellers.json where relevant, a privacy page that names the signals you honor, and comparison pages that answer buyers’ real questions. Our AEO for SaaS companies page covers this work for software products.
Related services
These pages cover the software, infrastructure and marketing work around an ad platform build.
- Custom software development company
- SaaS development company for subscription products
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- Custom software versus off-the-shelf: how to decide
- How to choose a tech stack
- The software development life cycle
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- Fintech software development
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- Marketing analytics agency
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Send the platform type, the partners and the traffic you expect. You get a free proposal with a written scope and a phase plan, and a same-business-day reply.
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Frequently asked questions
What does ad tech software development cover, and who commissions it?
What do ad tech companies do?
How do adtech companies make money?
What is an adtech platform?
Is ad tech SaaS?
What is a programmatic platform?
How does a programmatic platform process a single impression?
How is adtech different from martech when you are building software?
How does ad tech work for a publisher selling inventory?
What sets the price of building an adtech platform?
How long does it take to build an ad server or bidding platform?
Should we build an ad platform or buy one?
How do you build an ad server?
How do you build an ad network?
Can you build on an open-source ad server instead of starting from scratch?
Which version of OpenRTB should a new bidding platform support?
How should an ad platform handle consent signals such as TCF strings and Global Privacy Control?
Does the retirement of Google’s Privacy Sandbox APIs change what an ad platform should build?
Who owns the source code on an adtech development project?
What should we prepare before an adtech development company starts discovery?
Can you take over an existing ad tech codebase from another team?
Do you build ad platforms that target children or teenagers?
Is an adtech development company in New York able to work with teams in other countries?
Ready to scope an ad platform build?Send the platform type, the partners it must connect to and the volume you expect in year one. You get a free proposal with a written scope, a phase plan and the questions we still need answered, with a same-business-day reply.
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