In today’s environment, managing a digital ads business is complex. You have different types of content, deals, auction rules, even technology solutions. To extract the most value from your sites and apps, you need to be able to take all of these things into account at the same time. So when a user clicks on an article, presses play on a video, or opens your app, they’ll be served the ad that generates top dollar for you, while receiving a first-rate user experience.
With Google Ad Manager, partners can manage and optimize their direct deals and auctions across all of their inventory, including inventory sold with third-party advertising technologies, from one powerful platform. Our yield management solutions are designed to help publishers streamline their processes, so managing a variety of demand sources is not just simpler, but additive.
Let’s take a look at some of our direct, indirect, and yield management features that can help you make the most revenue from your inventory.
Perfecting the direct deal
Direct deals are an important aspect of nearly every publisher’s ad business, so Ad Manager allows partners to strike them in a variety of ways. While we’ve long had the capability to help publishers facilitate traditional reservations, we are seeing strong adoption of our Programmatic Direct deal types, particularly Programmatic Guaranteed.
Programmatic Guaranteed
In 2019, 85 of Ad Manager’s top 100 global publishers transacted Programmatic Guaranteed deals. And according to internal Google data from 2018 through 2019, the number of Programmatic Guaranteed deal orders placed increased by over 65 percent.
The Programmatic Guaranteed deal type simplifies the reservations workflow by combining the precision and control of direct deals with an automated media buying process, helping secure inventory for advertisers and revenue for publishers. The deal workflow also helps eliminate cumbersome and manual processes, such as exchanging tags, troubleshooting discrepancies, overseeing billing and reconciliation, as well as delivers performance benefits for advertisers.
According to a recent Google sponsored white paper from Harvard Business Review, top publishers embracing automated reservations like Programmatic Guaranteed have freed their direct sales teams to develop more strategic client relationships with their advertisers while offering a wider variety of deal types across their entire portfolio.
A better environment for indirect demand
After fulfilling your most premium campaigns through reservations, Ad Manager can help you earn more with solutions to manage all your programmatic demand sources. When it comes to ad auctions, a lot of things need to happen in a short amount of time. Subtle differences in how you connect your demand sources, configure your auctions, and deliver ads across your sites, apps, or channels can have a meaningful impact on how much revenue you’ll earn. Below are a few solutions that we’ve developed to ensure that you make optimal revenue, while also delivering first-class experiences for your users.
Open Bidding (formerly known as Exchange Bidding)
Open Bidding allows you to invite multiple third-party exchanges and ad networks to compete for your ad inventory in a unified, real-time first price auction. This solution reduces operational complexity and minimizes latency helping you achieve a higher yield on your ad inventory without sacrificing your user experience.
Open Bidding works across all your inventory, including web and app, display and video. It also provides customized tools, unified reporting, simplified billing, and complete auction transparency.
App Mediation
App Mediation, also referred to as mediation, increases mobile app revenue by calling a series of third-party ad networks in order of highest expected yield, based on static prices set by partners, or pulled from third-party ad networks periodically, to fill an ad request. It maximizes yield and fill rates by passing the request along in sequence. So if one ad network doesn’t fill the request, the next ad network in the sequence gains an opportunity.
For mobile app, we’ve designed mediation and Open Bidding to work well together. Ad Manager first selects the highest paying bid from Authorized Buyers and Open Bidding buyers and inserts the winning price in order into the mediation chain. This way app partners get a unified mediation chain, that’s optimized for yield and inclusive of real-time bids. – Read more
