Most of the requests an exchange receives never get a bid. Sending them to every buyer wastes bandwidth, slows partners down and costs you capacity. Traffic shaping on the Programmatic ADX fixes that.
What traffic shaping does
Shaping stops requests that no partner bids on. Combined with rule-based routing, each partner receives only the traffic it buys, for example only the formats a partner actually takes.
Why it matters
- Buyers respond better when they get relevant requests, which can improve bid rates.
- Your QPS goes further. On a rented ADX, capacity is priced by QPS, so not forwarding dead requests matters. See QPS and scaling on the ADX.
- Partner health stays clear. Response logs and partner health in the overview show who is bidding and who is not.
Example
In the partner list, a supply partner can be marked "Shaped": it still sends traffic, but only the part that buyers bid on is passed on.
Protecting against floods
Shaping handles wasted traffic. For partners that suddenly send far too much, the Traffic Shield plugin ($1,990, one payment) gives each partner its own QPS cap and blocks floods before they reach your servers.
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