Tag Archives: Google Ad Manager

Deliver the best ad experience every time

This post is the fourth in a series exploring several of Ad Manager’s key features and how they help our publisher partners maximize their ad revenue. To learn more, read posts one, two, and three.

Ten years ago, it was difficult for most to imagine how quickly ad formats would change, or how the rise of mobile and proliferation of video would create so many moments for people to engage with content. I talk to partners every day about how they can’t just keep up with these changes, but must make the most of them to grow their revenue. Key to this is delivering the right ad, in the right format, at the right moment. 

From in-app rewarded video to connected TV ads, Google Ad Manger was built to power the full scope of your digital advertising business. Instead of having to pull together standalone solutions for different types of ads, our publisher partners can select from a full suite of premium formats on Ad Manager to serve ads that add value and help boost revenue. We’ve also made it possible to integrate and manage inventory and formats from third party ad serving platforms, should you choose to use them. 

Here’s an overview of some of the formats you can use and serve through Ad Manager.

 

Video ads delivered seamlessly, inside and outside of the player

The data is in, both audiences and advertisers love digital video. To help you make the most of video’s growth, we’ve been steadily investing in new ad formats, delivery improvements, and platform integrations on devices like connected TVs and smart devices. 

Here are a few features and formats that work to ensure you can extract the most value from your content with video ads.

Dynamic Ad Insertion delivers personalized in-stream video experiences at scale
Dynamic Ad Insertion brings the quality of TV ads to any digital device, including internet enabled televisions. It helps you earn more revenue for your video inventory by delivering a seamless and personalized viewer experience. 

Because it’s built directly into Ad Manager, Dynamic Ad Insertion helps you take advantage of advanced monetization software and machine learning to maximize your revenue across devices, for live and on-demand content. It reliably supports millions of concurrent viewers with advanced pre-fetching of ads, sophisticated failure mitigation systems, and Google infrastructure and serving capacity. Our partners have used it during the World Cup, the Winter Olympics, the NFL Playoffs, and more.

In-article and in-feed video formats
Historically most video ad opportunities have been limited to players and in-stream content. But that’s changing, and fast. We’ve introduced five programmatic video formats on Ad Manager that can be served to people outside of the player. Partners using the platform can easily serve video ads within all of their content feeds and articles programmatically by opting into video ad experiences in protections.

Both the in-feed and in-article versions of these video ads seamlessly fit a user's scrolling behavior on both web and apps. They’re muted by default to ensure they don’t disrupt the user, and they only play when 50 percent or more of the ad is in view, ensuring higher viewability rates. If users choose to engage with an ad, they can tap to unmute the video


Rewarded ads create a better ad experience

Ads that users can choose to view in exchange for an in-app reward—such as watching a video ad to get an extra life in a game—are called rewarded ads. These ad experiences can keep users more engaged, offer a better overall app experience, and can deliver more revenue for your business. 

In a recent Google study, 50 percent of users reported that they would be less satisfied with their app experience if rewarded ads were removed. With Ad Manager, you can set up and choose from a range of ad formats and sizes, from video to interactive ads, as well as different rewards.


Native ads match the design of your site

Native ads are highly effective because they’re formatted to match the look and feel of the sites and apps they appear on. According to a 2017 Google study, users found native ads less distracting than banners because they present a more cohesive experience overall. 

In contrast to conventional banners, Native ads are built with components—pieces of creative that the advertiser provides, like headlines and images. Ad Manager makes it easy for publishers to take these components and style them to create ads that are unique to their site or app. From news feeds to shopping sites, you can customize and optimize your native ads with Ad Manager to determine which formats look the best and earn the most.

Our team continues to innovate with solutions like these, so you can cater to consumers’ changing preferences and take advantage of evolving formats to grow ad revenue.

To learn more about how Ad Manager can help you manage, protect, and grow your advertising business, visit our new feature brief archive in the resources section of our website. And we’ve got one more post in store for this series, Use insights to make better business decisions.

Deliver the best ad experience every time

This post is the fourth in a series exploring several of Ad Manager’s key features and how they help our publisher partners maximize their ad revenue. To learn more, read posts one, two, and three.

Ten years ago, it was difficult for most to imagine how quickly ad formats would change, or how the rise of mobile and proliferation of video would create so many moments for people to engage with content. I talk to partners every day about how they can’t just keep up with these changes, but must make the most of them to grow their revenue. Key to this is delivering the right ad, in the right format, at the right moment. 

From in-app rewarded video to connected TV ads, Google Ad Manger was built to power the full scope of your digital advertising business. Instead of having to pull together standalone solutions for different types of ads, our publisher partners can select from a full suite of premium formats on Ad Manager to serve ads that add value and help boost revenue. We’ve also made it possible to integrate and manage inventory and formats from third party ad serving platforms, should you choose to use them. 

Here’s an overview of some of the formats you can use and serve through Ad Manager.

 

Video ads delivered seamlessly, inside and outside of the player

The data is in, both audiences and advertisers love digital video. To help you make the most of video’s growth, we’ve been steadily investing in new ad formats, delivery improvements, and platform integrations on devices like connected TVs and smart devices. 

Here are a few features and formats that work to ensure you can extract the most value from your content with video ads.

Dynamic Ad Insertion delivers personalized in-stream video experiences at scale
Dynamic Ad Insertion brings the quality of TV ads to any digital device, including internet enabled televisions. It helps you earn more revenue for your video inventory by delivering a seamless and personalized viewer experience. 

Because it’s built directly into Ad Manager, Dynamic Ad Insertion helps you take advantage of advanced monetization software and machine learning to maximize your revenue across devices, for live and on-demand content. It reliably supports millions of concurrent viewers with advanced pre-fetching of ads, sophisticated failure mitigation systems, and Google infrastructure and serving capacity. Our partners have used it during the World Cup, the Winter Olympics, the NFL Playoffs, and more.

In-article and in-feed video formats
Historically most video ad opportunities have been limited to players and in-stream content. But that’s changing, and fast. We’ve introduced five programmatic video formats on Ad Manager that can be served to people outside of the player. Partners using the platform can easily serve video ads within all of their content feeds and articles programmatically by opting into video ad experiences in protections.

Both the in-feed and in-article versions of these video ads seamlessly fit a user's scrolling behavior on both web and apps. They’re muted by default to ensure they don’t disrupt the user, and they only play when 50 percent or more of the ad is in view, ensuring higher viewability rates. If users choose to engage with an ad, they can tap to unmute the video


Rewarded ads create a better ad experience

Ads that users can choose to view in exchange for an in-app reward—such as watching a video ad to get an extra life in a game—are called rewarded ads. These ad experiences can keep users more engaged, offer a better overall app experience, and can deliver more revenue for your business. 

In a recent Google study, 50 percent of users reported that they would be less satisfied with their app experience if rewarded ads were removed. With Ad Manager, you can set up and choose from a range of ad formats and sizes, from video to interactive ads, as well as different rewards.


Native ads match the design of your site

Native ads are highly effective because they’re formatted to match the look and feel of the sites and apps they appear on. According to a 2017 Google study, users found native ads less distracting than banners because they present a more cohesive experience overall. 

In contrast to conventional banners, Native ads are built with components—pieces of creative that the advertiser provides, like headlines and images. Ad Manager makes it easy for publishers to take these components and style them to create ads that are unique to their site or app. From news feeds to shopping sites, you can customize and optimize your native ads with Ad Manager to determine which formats look the best and earn the most.

Our team continues to innovate with solutions like these, so you can cater to consumers’ changing preferences and take advantage of evolving formats to grow ad revenue.

To learn more about how Ad Manager can help you manage, protect, and grow your advertising business, visit our new feature brief archive in the resources section of our website. And we’ve got one more post in store for this series, Use insights to make better business decisions.

Safeguard your advertising business

This post is the third in a series exploring several of Ad Manager’s key features and how they help our publisher partners maximize their ad revenue. To learn more, see posts one and two which were published in March.

Protecting users from bad ads and malicious actors is key to a healthy revenue stream. Things like inappropriate creative, counterfeit inventory, and malware not only divert revenue from you, but also alienate your users, and degrade the online experience in general.


Some people respond by installing ad blockers, which prevent ads—all ads, good and bad—from appearing. When this happens, every publisher pays the price, as it means they earn less money from the free content we all enjoy. For advertisers who create good ads, these obstacles make it tougher to connect with customers. And for consumers, it means they’ll see less useful ads.


Google Ad Manager helps power our partners’ digital advertising businesses, including helping to combat ad fraud and bad ads. Here are three ways we're working to protect your business and the broader ecosystem from bad ads and invalid activity:


We continuously invest in our defenses against ad fraud

By using a combination of people, policies, and technology, our global team of subject matter experts, PhDs, and engineers have fine-tuned our ad systems policies to provide clear guidance on what is and is not acceptable. To date the team has launched over 200 automated filters that help defend our ad systems from invalid activity in a lasting way. 

One of the ways we did this in 2019 was by investing in new technology to better identify policy-violating behavior at the account level, as opposed to the ad level. Our efforts resulted in 2.7 billion bad ads being taken down in 2019—more than 5,000 bad ads per minute—and the termination of 1.5 million advertiser accounts for violations, 3x more than in 2018.

Bad Ad Reports Hero Gif

We develop tools to help you manage which ads are shown on your properties 

We provide and develop new tools to help you manage and control which ads are shown across your sites and apps. Pricing rules and blocking options provide granular control over your inventory before the auction process. Features like the Ad review center help you review individual ads after they've been shown to decide whether you continue to show them, block them, or report them in real-time.


Ad Review Center v2

Ad review center

We also understand that sometimes people make honest mistakes when setting up their ads businesses, so we’ve developed solutions like the App Policy Center to help you easily review and monitor policy violations or appeals you may have. The App Policy Center was designed to provide greater insight into our policy enforcement process and help reduce the risk of potential revenue loss.


App Policy Center

App policy center

We support industry initiatives

We invest in industry initiatives to help tackle bad ads for everyone in the ads ecosystem. Here are three key initiatives that we invested in and continue to support to help prevent bad ads.

  • Ads.txt and app-ads.txt: These projects are aimed at preventing counterfeit inventory, which diverts revenue from publishers. They allow Ad tech companies to identify unauthorized and domain-spoofed inventory being sold across the industry by letting website owners publicly declare who is allowed to sell their ad space. We scan more than 30 million domains a day and are proud to say that nearly 90 percent of our publisher partners have adopted ads.txt.
  • The Better Ads Standards: These standards are based on extensive user research conducted by the Coalition for Better Ads about which ad formats and ad experiences consumers think are the most annoying and disruptive. They’ve identified 4 desktop and 8 mobile web display ad experiences that companies should avoid in order to maintain a good user experience, and help create a better online environment for everyone.
  • Open Measurement: This software development kit (SDK) is an industry-wide solution to the challenge of measuring viewability of ads in apps. We offer our partners access to the Open Measurement Initiative by integrating the SDK into our mobile ads products. This preserves your revenue stream by ensuring your inventory is considered for purchase.

The Ad Manager team is constantly working to develop and improve ad policies and protective solutions like those mentioned above. When we protect our publishers, we help ensure the entire advertising ecosystem is as healthy as possible, and everyone benefits.

To learn more about how Ad Manager can help you manage, protect, and grow your advertising business, visit our new feature brief archive in the resources section of our website. And keep an eye out for our next post, "Deliver the best ad experience every time".

Stopping bad ads to protect users

People trust Google when they’re looking for information, and we’re committed to ensuring they can trust the ads they see on our platforms, too. This commitment is especially important in times of uncertainty, such as the past few months as the world has confronted COVID-19. 


Responding to COVID-19

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, we’ve closely monitored advertiser behavior to protect users from ads looking to take advantage of the crisis. These often come from sophisticated actors attempting to evade our enforcement systems with advanced tactics. For example, as the situation evolved, we saw a sharp spike in fraudulent ads for in-demand products like face masks. These ads promoted products listed significantly above market price, misrepresented the product quality to trick people into making a purchase or were placed by merchants who never fulfilled the orders. 

We have a dedicated COVID-19 task force that’s been working around the clock. They have built new detection technology and have also improved our existing enforcement systems to stop bad actors. These concerted efforts are working. We’ve blocked and removed tens of millions of coronavirus-related ads over the past few months for policy violations including price-gouging, capitalizing on global medical supply shortages, making misleading claims about cures and promoting illegitimate unemployment benefits.

Simultaneously, the coronavirus has become an important and enduring topic in everyday conversation and we’re working on ways to allow advertisers across industries to share relevant updates with their audiences. Over the past several weeks, for example, we’ve specifically helped NGOs, governments, hospitals and healthcare providers run PSAs. We continue to take a measured approach to adjusting our enforcement to ensure that we are protecting users while prioritizing critical information from trusted advertisers.


Preserving the integrity of the ecosystem

Preserving the integrity of the ads on our platforms, as we’re doing during the COVID-19 outbreak, is a continuation of the work we do every day to minimize content that violates our policies and stop malicious actors. We have thousands of people working across our teams to make sure we’re protecting our users and enabling a safe ecosystem for advertisers and publishers, and each year we share a summary of the work we’ve done.

In 2019, we blocked and removed 2.7 billion bad ads—that’s more than 5,000 bad ads per minute. We also suspended nearly 1 million advertiser accounts for policy violations. On the publisher side, we terminated over 1.2 million accounts and removed ads from over 21 million web pages that are part of our publisher network for violating our policies. Terminating accounts—not just removing an individual ad or page—is an especially effective enforcement tool that we use if advertisers or publishers engage in egregious policy violations or have a history of violating policy.

2.7 billion taken down.gif

Improving enforcement against phishing and "trick-to-click" ads 

If we find specific categories of ads are more prone to abuse, we prioritize our resources to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of users. One of the areas that we’ve become familiar with is phishing, a common practice used by deceptive players to collect personal information from users under false pretenses. For example, in 2019 we saw more bad actors targeting people seeking to renew their passport. These ads mimicked real ads for renewal sites but their actual intent was to get users to provide sensitive information such as their social security or credit card number. Another common area of abuse is “trick-to-click” ads—which are designed to trick people into interacting with them by using prominent links (for example, “click here”) often designed to look like computer or mobile phone system warnings.

Because we’ve come to expect certain recurring categories like phishing and “trick-to-click,” we’re able to more effectively fight them. In 2019, we assembled an internal team to track the patterns and signals of these types of fraudulent advertisers so we could identify and remove their ads faster. As a result, we saw nearly a 50 percent decrease of bad ads served in both categories from the previous year. In total, we blocked more than 35 million phishing ads and 19 million “trick-to-click” ads in 2019.

Top Offenders.png

Adapting our policies and technology in real time

Certain industries are particularly susceptible to malicious behavior. For example, as more consumers turn to online financial services over brick and mortar locations, we identified an increase in personal loan ads with misleading information on lending terms. To combat this, we broadened our policy to only allow loan-related ads to run if the advertiser clearly states all fees, risks and benefits on their website or app so that users can make informed decisions. This updated policy enabled us to take down 9.6 million of these types of bad ads in 2019, doubling our number from 2018. 

At the end of last year, we also introduced a certification program for debt management advertisers in select countries that offer to negotiate with creditors to remedy debt or credit problems. We know users looking for help with this are often at their most vulnerable and we want to create a safe experience for them. This new program ensures we’re only allowing advertisers who are registered by the local regulatory agencies to serve ads for this type of service. We’re continuing to explore ways to scale this program to more countries to match local finance regulations. 


Looking forward

Maintaining trust in the digital advertising ecosystem is a top priority for Google. And with global health concerns now top of mind for everyone, preparing for and responding to attempts to take advantage of our users is as important as it has ever been. We know abuse tactics will continue evolving and new societal issues will arise. We'll continue to make sure we’re protecting our users, advertisers and publishers from bad actors across our advertising platforms. 

Source: Google Ads


Stopping bad ads to protect users

People trust Google when they’re looking for information, and we’re committed to ensuring they can trust the ads they see on our platforms, too. This commitment is especially important in times of uncertainty, such as the past few months as the world has confronted COVID-19. 


Responding to COVID-19

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, we’ve closely monitored advertiser behavior to protect users from ads looking to take advantage of the crisis. These often come from sophisticated actors attempting to evade our enforcement systems with advanced tactics. For example, as the situation evolved, we saw a sharp spike in fraudulent ads for in-demand products like face masks. These ads promoted products listed significantly above market price, misrepresented the product quality to trick people into making a purchase or were placed by merchants who never fulfilled the orders. 

We have a dedicated COVID-19 task force that’s been working around the clock. They have built new detection technology and have also improved our existing enforcement systems to stop bad actors. These concerted efforts are working. We’ve blocked and removed tens of millions of coronavirus-related ads over the past few months for policy violations including price-gouging, capitalizing on global medical supply shortages, making misleading claims about cures and promoting illegitimate unemployment benefits.

Simultaneously, the coronavirus has become an important and enduring topic in everyday conversation and we’re working on ways to allow advertisers across industries to share relevant updates with their audiences. Over the past several weeks, for example, we’ve specifically helped NGOs, governments, hospitals and healthcare providers run PSAs. We continue to take a measured approach to adjusting our enforcement to ensure that we are protecting users while prioritizing critical information from trusted advertisers.


Preserving the integrity of the ecosystem

Preserving the integrity of the ads on our platforms, as we’re doing during the COVID-19 outbreak, is a continuation of the work we do every day to minimize content that violates our policies and stop malicious actors. We have thousands of people working across our teams to make sure we’re protecting our users and enabling a safe ecosystem for advertisers and publishers, and each year we share a summary of the work we’ve done.

In 2019, we blocked and removed 2.7 billion bad ads—that’s more than 5,000 bad ads per minute. We also suspended nearly 1 million advertiser accounts for policy violations. On the publisher side, we terminated over 1.2 million accounts and removed ads from over 21 million web pages that are part of our publisher network for violating our policies. Terminating accounts—not just removing an individual ad or page—is an especially effective enforcement tool that we use if advertisers or publishers engage in egregious policy violations or have a history of violating policy.

2.7 billion taken down.gif

Improving enforcement against phishing and "trick-to-click" ads 

If we find specific categories of ads are more prone to abuse, we prioritize our resources to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of users. One of the areas that we’ve become familiar with is phishing, a common practice used by deceptive players to collect personal information from users under false pretenses. For example, in 2019 we saw more bad actors targeting people seeking to renew their passport. These ads mimicked real ads for renewal sites but their actual intent was to get users to provide sensitive information such as their social security or credit card number. Another common area of abuse is “trick-to-click” ads—which are designed to trick people into interacting with them by using prominent links (for example, “click here”) often designed to look like computer or mobile phone system warnings.

Because we’ve come to expect certain recurring categories like phishing and “trick-to-click,” we’re able to more effectively fight them. In 2019, we assembled an internal team to track the patterns and signals of these types of fraudulent advertisers so we could identify and remove their ads faster. As a result, we saw nearly a 50 percent decrease of bad ads served in both categories from the previous year. In total, we blocked more than 35 million phishing ads and 19 million “trick-to-click” ads in 2019.

Top Offenders.png

Adapting our policies and technology in real time

Certain industries are particularly susceptible to malicious behavior. For example, as more consumers turn to online financial services over brick and mortar locations, we identified an increase in personal loan ads with misleading information on lending terms. To combat this, we broadened our policy to only allow loan-related ads to run if the advertiser clearly states all fees, risks and benefits on their website or app so that users can make informed decisions. This updated policy enabled us to take down 9.6 million of these types of bad ads in 2019, doubling our number from 2018. 

At the end of last year, we also introduced a certification program for debt management advertisers in select countries that offer to negotiate with creditors to remedy debt or credit problems. We know users looking for help with this are often at their most vulnerable and we want to create a safe experience for them. This new program ensures we’re only allowing advertisers who are registered by the local regulatory agencies to serve ads for this type of service. We’re continuing to explore ways to scale this program to more countries to match local finance regulations. 


Looking forward

Maintaining trust in the digital advertising ecosystem is a top priority for Google. And with global health concerns now top of mind for everyone, preparing for and responding to attempts to take advantage of our users is as important as it has ever been. We know abuse tactics will continue evolving and new societal issues will arise. We'll continue to make sure we’re protecting our users, advertisers and publishers from bad actors across our advertising platforms. 

Source: Google Ads


Earn more from your ads

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.  

Smarter Ad Breaks for video and advanced TV

We’ve brought our extensive experience with video to bear to develop the Smarter Ad Breaks feature suite for video and advanced TV partners. The suite helps maximize the value of commercial breaks by combining the control of linear TV selling with the addressability of digital advertising. You can customize each individual ad slot to build a personalized commercial break, known as an Optimized Pod. You set the pod length and Ad Manager will look across open auction, sponsorships, direct deals, and Programmatic Guaranteed deals to slot in ads yielding the highest possible revenue. 

Using the Smarter Ad Breaks feature suite provides higher monetization through enhanced yield management, time savings through seamless workflow efficiencies, greater user experience through lower ad load latency, and brand safety protections like unified competitive exclusions. 


Bring it all together, with comprehensive yield management

The most difficult task when trying to make the most from your inventory is knowing the best buyer to sell your inventory to. That’s why harmonizing your direct and indirect demand in a single, powerful auction is important. Ad Manager offers a suite of yield management solutions designed to help you find the best model for monetizing inventory across all of your advertising partners.

We start by maximizing your yield with a single, unified first price auction that reconciles all of your guaranteed campaigns and non-guaranteed advertising sources—including real-time bidding partners (such as Authorized Buyers and Open Bidding partners) and non-guaranteed line items (including those used in header bidding implementations). This all happens in a transparent and fair marketplace to help you manage your inventory as efficiently and effectively as possible. 

In addition to increasing yield through competition, we’ve also developed automated and machine learning features like Dynamic Allocation, First Look, Optimized Competition, and Target CPM to help you make the most revenue possible without having to do anything. In fact, in 2018 we made nearly 50 optimizations aimed at improving publisher revenue, that generated 15% more revenue on mobile web and 9% more revenue in total for publishers using Google Ad Manager.

To learn more about how Ad Manager can help you manage your digital advertising business, read the complete blog series here or visit our new feature brief archive in the resources section of our website. And stay tuned for our next post on, Safeguard your advertising business.

Everything you need to power your digital advertising business

Every publisher has a unique business model, competitive advantage, and value proposition for their users. Because of this, we built Google Ad Manager to be feature-rich and flexible. From live streaming on connected TVs to rewarded ads in your apps, the Ad Manager platform offers all of the functionality and tools you need to power your digital advertising business.

With Ad Manager, you can manage all of your direct and indirect advertiser demand in one place, deploy a wide variety of engaging ad formats, and access and implement machine learning-generated forecasting, insights, and optimization recommendations. You can even integrate other advertising technology providers in the platform—should you choose to use them. 

Most importantly, we help you protect the value of your inventory by investing in defenses against ad fraud, developing ad monitoring tools, and supporting industry initiatives that help address bad ads for everyone in the ecosystem.

Earn more with Ad Manager  

Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of blog posts exploring several of Ad Manager’s key features and how they help our publisher partners maximize their ad revenue. Here’s what we’ll cover in the series:

  • Post 1: Earn more from your ads
  • Post 2: Safeguard your advertising business
  • Post 3: Deliver the best ad experience every time
  • Post 4: Use insights to make better business decisions

We hope this series sparks new ideas for how Ad Manager can help you continue to grow your ads business. In the meantime, visit the resources section of our site to learn more about what Ad Manager can do. 

The next-generation telco bundle: How telcos are embracing a digital transformation

The global telecommunications industry, which is comprised of traditional cable operators, satellite, wireless, and internet service providers, is in the midst of a digital transformation. Consumers’ expectations for integrated and on-demand experiences are driving demand for superior internet connectivity and digital TV and video content, creating more competition in TV and video than ever before. The market is changing rapidly with the proliferation of mobile and connected TV devices, more direct-to-consumer (DTC) and skinny bundle offerings, and new ways to monetize these experiences.


To gain a deeper perspective on emerging strategies and solutions across the telco market, we worked with international research and strategy consultancy MTM to conduct 25 long-form interviews with senior executives from leading telcos around the world. The findings which are summarized in our new report—calledThe Next-Generation Telco Bundle—explores industry perspectives on these changes as leading telcos rethink their video aggregation strategies, restructure their bundles, and diversify their offerings.

Here’s a few of our key takeaways on the future of the telco industry:


Doubling down on connectivity is a key priority for all telcos. 

Better broadband connectivity and reliability is essential and will remain the “foundation for business growth,” having become a “home necessity” in the words of one executive. Connectivity’s importance will continue to grow with consumer demand for greater network speed and data, especially as new devices and emerging technology such as 5G become available.


TV and video still play an important role in the telco bundle, especially for larger telcos. 

When we asked telcos how important TV and video is to their business, the average response was 4.5 out of 5—TV and video remain extremely important to their strategies. It helps telcos attract and retain subscribers, differentiate their offerings, and explore new advertising opportunities which are expected to scale rapidly with the onset of digital technology and as telcos develop more over-the-top (OTT) video streaming apps and aggregation offerings.


Creating the next-generation bundle is on the horizon, as many telcos look to diversify their portfolios with new products and services. 

As one telco executive put it: “What’s going to be the fifth product?” Telcos are uniquely positioned to lead the thoughtful home evolution and add-ons may include smart home automation and other internet of things (IoT) innovations, streaming games, and new connected devices.

To help telcos adapt and succeed with these strategies, Google has developed solutions that allow telcos to grow their core business of connectivity and video, expand beyond their core business with new products and services, and enhance technology and operations. This includes solutions like Android TV which offers telcos a customizable platform to launch both managed TV services and DTC experiences, integrations with Google Hardware such as Nest products to create a helpful home, and Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI which can help telcos automate call centers and improve customer experiences. 

To support new revenue growth, Google Ad Manager’s advanced TV solutions make it possible for telcos to monetize their connected footprint across all screens with seamless, personalized, and measurable ad experiences everywhere their customers are engaging. Solutions like Dynamic Ad Insertion enable telcos to deliver addressable ads on OTT content at scale whether in the living room or on a mobile device and optimize for the best user experience, Inventory Sharing makes it possible for telcos to honor complex business agreements across all of their partners, and Smarter Ad Breaks allows for personalized commercial breaks while maximizing revenue across reservation and programmatic inventory. 

Google’s solutions are built with the future of the telco industry in mind as connectivity and digital video growth continue, and as thoughtful home and automated customer care solutions advance, enabling our telco partners to sustain long-term growth during this time of transformation and beyond. 

To learn more about how telcos are transitioning into this exciting new era, download The Next-Generation Telco Bundle and read the full report.

2019 Google Ad Manager Recap

2019 is all but behind us. But before we move forward, we’re taking a moment to look back and reflect on another year filled with partner successes, new learnings and of course, product launches. 


Below are some of our top moments from throughout the year.

AM 1

Celebrated our partners' successes

Success stories showed the amazing work of our global partners. Check out these stories to learn how partners like...

  • India’s SonyLIV used Ad Manager to grow OTT ad impressions by 5x. 

  • Argentine news outlet Clarín delivered high-impact, custom ad formats programmatically. 

  • DAZN grew programmatic video revenue by over 150% using Exchange Bidding.

See more success stories from 2019 here.

AM 2

Launched new product solutions

In an effort to help publishers grow and simplify their advertising business, we developed several new features and updated existing ones: 
 

  • Simplified how partners manage advertising revenue and increased transparency for everyone in the ecosystem by moving Ad Manager to a first price auction.
  • Helped TV partners transition to digital advertising by launching new features like inventory sharing, ad break templates, TV forecasting, and real-time reporting for live and on-demand content. See our comprehensive product guide detailing all the ways Ad Manager can help programmers manage their digital ads businesses.
  • Released Programmatic Guaranteed with custom creatives. Looking to get started with this direct deal type? Start here. Then move to this Think with Google article detailing how to get the most out of your programmatic reservations.
See the details of all our 2019 product updates.
AM 3

Shared actionable insights

Helped partners demystify large challenges and act on opportunities by delivering insights and research across several critical business areas.
 

  • In partnership with Deloitte and the Google News Initiative, we published a global report to help publishers responsibly analyze and activate their data to improve user engagement, increase direct-paying relationships with readers, and drive revenue from advertising. 

  • Produced our first-ever advanced TV inventory report that analyzed how TV broadcasters around the globe are selling their inventory across digital channels. The report also explores which signals will play the largest role in driving demand and pricing as TV inventory shifts towards programmatic.  

Explore all Ad Manager guides and reports here.

AM 4

Encouraged a safe and healthy ads ecosystem

This year we took steps to ensure that our platform and policies are meeting users, publishers, and advertisers evolving expectations.

AM 5

Published materials to help you learn and do more

Throughout the year we also developed a suite of feature briefs that detail many of the capabilities and benefits that the Ad Manager platform delivers for partners. Published dozens of articles and blogs highlighting news and announcements about new product developments, events and partnerships. And added new articles to the monetization section on Think With Google. 


To stay up to date on our latest news you can sign up for the Google Publisher Connection newsletter, or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Thank you to all of our partners for your contributions and input on Ad Manager product development and thought-leadership this year. Onward! See you in 2020.

Additional steps to safeguard user privacy

Like many adtech providers, we use an advertising technology called Real-Time Bidding (RTB) to enable publishers of all sizes to sell online ad impressions in real time, funding a variety of content such as online journalism, videos and music. On our RTB platform, we’ve taken strong measures to protect user privacy —for instance, we require publishers to obtain consent from users to serve personalized ads, and we apply data minimization practices to the scope of the data shared in RTB bid requests, including truncating device IP addresses and using only resettable user IDs. 

On top of these protections, we will now be taking an additional step to further guard user privacy. Following our engagement with data protection authorities, we have decided that beginning in February 2020 we will no longer include contextual content categories in the bid requests we send to buyers participating in our auction. 

Content categories are descriptions of the type of content on a specific page, website or app. For example, these categories may indicate whether the content is about news or weather, and are intended to provide contextual information to advertisers about the site or app where the impression may appear. They help advertisers avoid showing ads on certain types of content that aren’t suitable for their brands, or as a way for advertisers to identify types of content where they do want to serve ads.

While we already prohibit advertisers from using our services to build user profiles around sensitive categories, this change will help avoid the risk that any participant in our auctions is able to associate individual ad identifiers with Google’s contextual content categories. We’ll also update our EU User Consent Policy audit program for publishers and advertisers, as well as our audits for the Authorized Buyers program. And we will continue to engage with data protection authorities, including the Irish Data Protection Commission as they continue their investigation into data protection practices in the context of Authorized Buyers.

Trust is the foundation of a healthy and sustainable advertising ecosystem. That’s why we’re working across products to ensure that our policies and practices are evolving to reflect people’s changing expectations around how data is collected and used. We will continue to ensure that people’s choices about the use of their data are respected, offer users additional controls, and increase transparency into how digital advertising works.