Learn OpenRTB from the auction up
Start with what OpenRTB is if the protocol is new to you. Then follow one auction from page load to render, learn to read the specification, and pick the page for your role. The tutorials build a working bidder you can test against real payloads.
How it works
How an OpenRTB auction runs from page load to ad render
Follow one impression through an OpenRTB auction: the ad request, the bid request fan-out, bidding inside tmax, the auction, win and billing notices, and rendering.
Read →How to read the OpenRTB specification
Where the OpenRTB spec lives, how its object tables, AdCOM lists, dated 2.6 snapshots, and implementation guide fit together, and how to look up a field quickly.
Read →What your role owns
OpenRTB for publisher and SSP engineers
What a sell-side engineer owns in OpenRTB: building complete bid requests, consent and supply chain signals, floors, timeouts, and handling responses and notices.
Read →OpenRTB for DSP and bidder engineers
What a buy-side engineer owns in OpenRTB: parsing requests defensively, answering inside tmax, building valid bids and markup, no-bid reasons, and using loss feedback.
Read →OpenRTB for ad ops and product managers
The OpenRTB fields that move revenue and the signals buyers filter on, explained for ad ops and product managers who read payloads but do not write the code.
Read →Build and test
Build a minimal OpenRTB bidder in Node.js
A working OpenRTB 2.6 bidder in under 150 lines of Node.js: parse and validate the request, respect tmax, return a bid or a no-bid, and handle win notices.
Read →Build a minimal OpenRTB bidder in Rust
A working OpenRTB 2.6 bidder in Rust with axum and serde: validate requests with rtblint-core, answer inside tmax, and return a bid or an empty 204.
Read →Test an OpenRTB bidder with fixtures in CI
Keep a bidder honest with recorded request fixtures, response validation against the request, and a CI step that fails on spec violations before deploy.
Read →Reference while you learn
- The field reference has a page for every OpenRTB 2.x field.
- The enumerated lists explain every integer code.
- The glossary defines the terms in plain words.
- The FAQ answers the questions that come up in integrations.