Every demand partner bids. You keep the winning price.
IMC header bidding puts your inventory in front of every major exchange and DSP at the same moment, then settles each impression at the highest bid. No waterfall priorities. No guesswork about what your space was worth.
- Unified auctions across exchanges, DSPs and direct deals
- Latency budgets enforced per partner, per placement
- Price floors tuned automatically as demand shifts
demand partners bidding per impression, on average
average RPM uplift in tier-1 after switching to unified auctions
connected DSP and SSP channels
of impressions settled at the highest recovered bid
How IMC header bidding works.
One unified auction replaces the old daisy-chained waterfall, where your inventory was sold to whoever got it first instead of whoever valued it most.
Managed wrapper, fully tuned.
We run the wrapper for you: partner mix, timeouts, floors and analytics, reviewed monthly by your yield manager.
Every major exchange and DSP, pre-integrated
Google Open Bidding, major header exchanges and IMC direct demand compete in one auction. Adding a partner is a dashboard toggle, not a re-engineering project.Per-partner timeouts
Your Core Web Vitals stay protected with enforced response budgets.
Dynamic price floors
Floors learn each placement and lift automatically as demand pressure grows.
Bid-level reporting
See every bid on every impression, filtered by partner, placement and geo.
Pre-bid filtering
Fraud and category rules are enforced before the auction, protecting your CPMs.
PMP and direct deals
Private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed deals compete alongside open demand.
Header bidding vs. the waterfall.
The waterfall shows your inventory to partners one at a time in a fixed priority order. If the first partner bids $0.50, the rest never even see the impression.
| Waterfall (old way) | IMC unified auctions | |
|---|---|---|
| Bidding order | Fixed priority list | All partners at once |
| Top bid exposure | First partner can block higher bids | Highest bid always surfaced |
| Settlement | First qualifying bid wins | Highest bid wins |
| Latency control | Unbounded timeouts | Enforced per-partner budgets |
| Rate transparency | Historic, per-partner | Bid-level, real time |
Premium budgets follow premium traffic.
IMC header bidding is built for publishers with meaningful tier-1 and tier-2/3 audiences. That is where auction pressure, and your rates, are highest.
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Australia
- Germany
- France
Header bidding FAQ.
The wrapper is asynchronous and every partner operates inside an enforced latency budget. If a partner responds slowly, its bid for that impression is passed over rather than delaying the auction.
It depends on your traffic and verticals. Most publishers settle on 6 to 12 partners after optimization. Your yield manager reviews partner-level win rates and adjusts the mix monthly.
No. IMC header bidding works with Google Ad Manager, other ad servers, or direct tag implementations. Setup is adapted to your existing stack.
Header bidding pays off once auction pressure is real, the current minimums are listed in the homepage FAQ. Below that line, our standard monetization stack is usually the better fit.
See the auction run on your inventory.
A personalized walkthrough with your placements, your geos and real bid data.