This article introduces the different parts of the Ad Tag Setup page to help you find your way around the Wowza Video user interface.  

Wowza Video is used by many customers to deliver video ads through our video player. Advertising is a great way to monetize your video content. Companies (ad publishers) interested in showing ads to your audience will place their video ads (the inventory) with an ad partner, with whom you will partner to monetize your video content.

The ad partner will provide you with ad tags to be integrated with the player, and the player (from a web page or a mobile app) will request the ad from the partner's ad server while sending back data about the ad display and associated tracking info. This is called an ad impression, and the publisher will pay for the impression, usually calculated as cost per mille (CPM), or cost per 1,000 impressions. It's a numerical value that tells you how many sets of “eyeballs“ have potentially viewed your ad.

The ad partner will try to optimize the revenue for you - and the value for the publisher - by categorizing your site/app and your video content and match it to campaign criteria set by the publishers, and show an ad from a publisher most likely of interest to your audience.

For example, if Acme Brick worked with an ad partner, they would ask for their commercials to run with a specific type of content, maybe a video about building houses. The ad partner then matches up the commercials to run during the type of videos Acme Brick specified. After matching, a viewer of a house-building video plays an Acme Brick ad during the video. The ad partner tracks the number of impressions. Once the ad reaches 1,000 impressions or more, the ad partner pays the owner of the video that month for the impressions based on agreed upon terms between Acme Brick and the ad partner for impressions.

We support all current VAST advertising standards across the web and you can review our list of supported formats for additional details.

Note: Wowza Video advertising works with client-side ad insertion (CCSAI) only. CCSAI means the video player, embedded in a website or app, requests an ad from an ad server on demand when playback is started.

You must have an ad server or ad network partner to use advertising in Wowza Video. Examples of ad partners are Google (Admanager / DFP), SpotXchange, and SpringServe. You create ad campaigns in the ad server UI and a VAST-compliant (version 2,3,4 or vpaid2) adTag is created with url  parameters and placeholders. 

The ad tag is usually a url to an XML document containing information like which creative (ad) to be played, whether it is skippable after a few seconds, which formats (like various MP4s, HLS) are available, which events should be tracked (watched /4, 2/4 etc of the ad before skipped), the click-through link, and many other optional parameters. You then attach the adTag in Wowza Video to a video player configuration, and the player will request ads for each video it is used with. 

The Ad Tag Setup page helps you to create an ad tag that you'll eventually add to an ad schedule.

• Name – A short, descriptive identifier for the ad tag that differentiates it from other ad tags (maximum 255 characters). 
• URL – The full url of the VAST adTag you received from your ad network partner. Make sure to not pre-fill the macros with static values.
• Timeout (ms) – The ad timout increases the time the player will wait for an ad to be returned from the ad server before starting the feature clip. Using a higher value may increase the chances of an ad fill if your ad server does waterfalling/redirects, but a value that's too high could impact user experience.