Tag Archives: Google Ad Manager

Google Ad Manager 2019 Advanced TV Inventory Report

In the age of digital media, TV programmers need to monetize their content wherever audiences are watching—whether that's on a connected TV, laptop or smartphone. But there are still several unanswered questions and challenges around selling and distributing TV inventory across the full range of digital devices.

Additionally, as programmatic’s share of advanced TV ad dollars continues to grow, programmers should begin to rethink their sales strategies to optimize their inventory offerings. Programmatic should no longer be thought of as a means to fill remnant TV inventory, but as a tool to ensure programmers are capturing the highest yield and revenue across all of their demand sources.

In an effort to help our TV partners better understand the global and regional trends of selling and distributing TV inventory in the digital ecosystem, Google Ad Manager researched the performance of 44 of its top TV programmer partners across APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and North America, from Q4 2018 through Q1 2019.

The results vary from region to region, but they all provide important insights TV programmers should be aware of as they move towards a programmatic future. For example:

Connected TV has emerged as the leading digital device to watch TV content on in North America. While mobile is the leading device for the digital viewership of TV content globally.
The majority of advanced TV ads shown on digital devices were sold via traditional reservations—direct deals transacted without automation. But programmatic direct and indirect deals are gaining momentum in several global regions.
TV programmers have an opportunity to take advantage of the automation, scale, and advanced functionality that programmatic platforms deliver. Programmatic Guaranteed has emerged as a leading programmatic deal type to efficiently transact TV media.
We’ve uncovered four indicators (viewability, addressability, context, and protections) that have the largest impact on digital TV inventory demand and value. We explore what these signals are, how they are created, and the impact they have on programmatic sales.

This new chapter in TV history will present programmers with a challenge and an opportunity to redefine the way they manage and monetize their businesses. And while advanced TV is still relatively nascent, we believe programmers should start positioning themselves now to ensure long-term success later.

To find out how to take advantage of the new opportunities advanced TV has to offer, download Google Ad Manager’s 2019 Advanced TV inventory report here.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Digital-first advertising solutions for TV programmers

The TV industry is going through a digital transformation as viewers watch more content in their living room on over-the-top (OTT) and streaming services. In fact, in the first half of this year, we saw connected TVs become the leading device in North America for Ad Manager programmer partners.¹ As TV converges with digital, we’ve been developing new advanced TV solutions that combine the flexibility and precision of digital with the scale and control of TV to help innovative media companies like Disney, Univision, and many more deliver seamless, personalized, and measurable ads. Today we’re adding new features to our advanced TV solutions for programmers including inventory sharing, ad break templates, TV forecasting and pacing, and real-time reporting.

Seamless ad experiences between programmers and distributors with inventory sharing

Programmers often have complex inventory sharing agreements with many content distributors, including traditional TV operators and digital distribution partners like virtual multi-channel video programming distributors (vMVPD) and OTT services, in which they share a portion of their ad inventory. To help remove some complexity, Ad Manager has launched a new inventory sharing feature that allows programmers and distributors to configure flexible inventory sharing rules in an easy-to-use workflow. Partners are now able to manage rules—like category exclusions, frequency caps, or yield management—across different inventory shares even when a distributor is using a different ad server from their programming partner. By bringing the automation of digital to traditional inventory sharing agreements, partners can deliver seamless ad experiences in all the places their content is available.

Personalized ad experiences with ad break templates

Ad Manager’s Smarter Ad Breaks suite offers partners the ability to deliver personalized ad experiences to viewers, while maximizing revenue and yield across both reservation and programmatic ads. We’re enhancing this product suite with the launch of Ad Break Templates which brings more TV-like control with digital flexibility to every commercial break. Ad Break Templates allow partners to craft a truly customized ad experience with an easy drag-and-drop functionality where they can specify the order, length, and type of ad spot in each commercial break for both live and on-demand content. Whether starting with a sponsorship ad, ending with a bumper ad, or designating a specific spot where a programmatic ad appears, Ad Break Templates give publishers the control they need for their commercial breaks. These templates can also be applied to future commercial breaks once they see what’s working best.

Our Smarter Ad Breaks suite is not only making it easier for partners to customize their commercial breaks, but also to increase revenue. Partners using Smarter Ad Breaks have seen over 50 percent revenue uplift compared to video ads served in a traditional manner.²

Measurable ad experiences with TV forecasting and real-time reporting

Live events like sports have become especially popular in streaming environments because they allow viewers to watch anywhere, but they can be challenging to monetize due to unpredictable viewership spikes. Ad Manager's TV forecasting now makes it possible for partners to accurately pace their TV inventory according to historical data and custom curves. Partners can fine tune their forecasts to account for peaks and valleys of season premieres, finales, live events, and everything in-between. This means sports streaming companies can more precisely pace ads in their live college football games ahead of time, so that they're not over or under sold, and can earn the most money from every commercial break.

Building on our TV forecasting capabilities, Ad Manager’s new real-time reporting feature allows programmers to validate that their campaigns are running as expected during an event. Live events are known for having a large amount of high-valued inventory available to fill in a short period of time, and any delivery issues can result in substantial missed ad opportunities. Real-time reporting provides partners a way to quickly identify and fix ad delivery issues in real time across their live and on-demand content. So when the basketball playoffs or the big college football matchup are streaming, people continue to have a broadcast-quality viewing experience and partners can continue to grow revenue.

These features are only the beginning of a truly converged TV and digital future. As we look ahead, we’ll continue to see our TV programming partners leverage more digital benefits, like the ability to use programmatic guaranteed to complement their TV sales and upfronts. And we’ll be focused on continuing to develop more digital-first ad features made for TV that empower our partners, today and in the future.

^1. Google Ad Manager, Ad Exchange, internal data, Q4 2018 - Q1 2019.

^2. Google Ad Manager, internal data, March 2018

Source: The Official Google Blog

A privacy-safe approach to managing ad frequency

At Google, we believe it's possible to improve user privacy while preserving access to the ad-supported web. Back in August, we shared an update on the progress we’re making toward this vision. Chrome put forward a series of proposals inviting the web standards community to start a discussion on how to advance user privacy while meeting the needs of publishers and advertisers. We also shared an initial proposal for practices that we believe would give people more visibility into and control over the data used for advertising.

Since then, we’ve engaged with product and engineering experts from across the digital ads ecosystem—including at the IAB Tech Lab’s Innovation Day on Data Responsibility, heard from brand and agency leaders during Advertising Week in New York, and met with our publishing and ad technology partners at the Google Ad Manager Partner Summit. This week, we’ll be holding discussions with our advertising and publishing partners in Europe at a series of events in London.

In all of these forums, the conversations have centered on how to reshape marketing and measurement solutions to be more privacy-forward for users, while ensuring they remain effective for the publishers and marketers that fund and sustain access to ad-supported content on the web.

One example is how advertisers manage the number of times someone sees an ad, a critical step to delivering a better user experience. When third-party cookies are blocked or restricted, advertisers lose the ability to limit the number of times someone sees their ads. This means that users may be bothered with the same ad repeatedly, advertisers may waste spend or decide to exclude certain media altogether, and publishers may earn less revenue as a result.

Using machine learning to manage ad frequency while respecting user privacy

That’s why, in the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out a feature in Display & Video 360 that uses machine learning to help advertisers manage ad frequency in a way that respects user privacy when third-party cookies are missing. And in the future, we plan to bring this capability to our display offerings in Google Ads.

Using traffic patterns where a third-party cookie is available, and analyzing them at an aggregated level across Google Ad Manager publishers, we can create models to predict traffic patterns when a third-party cookie isn’t present. This allows us to estimate how likely it is for users to visit different publishers who are serving the same ads through Google Ad Manager. Then, when there is no third-party cookie present, we’re able to optimize how often those ads should be shown to users.

Since we aggregate all user data before applying our machine learning models, no user-level information is shared across websites. Instead, this feature relies on a publisher’s first-party data to inform the ad experience for its own site visitors. It’s an approach to managing ad frequency that’s more privacy safe than workarounds such as fingerprinting, which rely on user-level signals like IP address, because it respects a user’s choice to opt out of third-party tracking.

This is a step in the right direction as we work across Google to raise the bar for how our products deliver better user experiences while also respecting user privacy. And this approach to ad frequency management can be a model for how the use case might one day be solved industry wide at the browser level. It’s consistent with Chrome’s explorations of new technology that would advance user privacy, while ensuring that publishers and advertisers can continue to sustain access to content on the open web.

As we continue engaging with users and key industry stakeholder groups, we look forward to sharing more of what we learn. Stay tuned for more updates on our blogs.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Rolling out first price auctions to Google Ad Manager partners

As we announced in March, we’re transitioning to unified first price auctions for Google Ad Manager to help our partners simplify how they manage advertising revenue and increase transparency for everyone in the ecosystem. Over the last few months, we’ve been testing the performance of this change and the results show that on average, first price auctions have a neutral to positive impact on a publisher’s total revenue—revenue from all their advertising sources—when compared to second price auctions. In addition, we found evidence that first price auctions have created a more competitive market, resulting in third parties (Demand Side Platforms and Ad Networks outside of Google) and indirect line items (like those from Header Bidding implementations) winning an increased share of impressions.

Based on these results, we are confident that moving to first price auctions in Ad Manager will ensure a fair and transparent marketplace that benefits the health of the programmatic ecosystem. That’s why, starting next week, we’ll continue with the full roll out of first price auctions to all partners using Google Ad Manager, with the expectation to complete the transition over the next few weeks.

Increasing auction transparency

After we’ve completed the transition to first price auctions, we’ll be able to provide additional auction transparency to both publishers and advertisers.

For publishers, we'll start a new beta that provides data from all the bids submitted to your auctions. With this Bid Data Transfer file, you’ll be able to create a full bid landscape that shows the range and number of bids you received, across dimensions like ad unit and buyer. This information will help you evaluate the value of your inventory and better understand the bidding behavior of buyers. In order to prevent bid data from being tied to individual users, you will not be able to join the Bid Data Transfer file with other Ad Manager Data Transfer files.

For Authorized Buyers and Open Bidders (formerly known as Exchange Bidding buyers), we’ll provide additional information post-auction to help inform your bidding strategies. Buyers will receive the minimum bid price to win after the auction closes. This feedback will help you understand when to bid higher to win valuable inventory.

Since we first announced our intent to transition Ad Manager to first price auctions, we’ve received feedback from many of our partners, which has helped inform our rollout plans. This dialogue led to changes such as increasing the maximum number of pricing rules and extending the length of the test period. Although we're not the first to make this change, we’re excited to take this step and continue to work with our partners to create a more sustainable advertising ecosystem.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Google Ad Manager’s API delivers control, connectivity and customization

Google Ad Manager has the flexibility to manage your entire digital ads business, including the ability to connect with other technology solutions. In order to do this, many partners employ the Google Ad Manager API to connect the data dots—and help make their businesses more effective and efficient. Ad Manager’s API capabilities allow publishers to build applications that interact directly with their platform accounts, and many publishers are already using them in a variety of ways.

For example, automating common workflows can save time and resources so that you don’t have to make changes manually. Or you can programmatically access your data, giving you the flexibility to populate custom dashboards or interfaces. And if you use the API to optimize your inventory based on the most up-to-date data, you can increase efficiency and help you get the most out of the ads you serve.

Here are five ways you can put the Ad Manager API to work to improve your business:

Automate data pulls for your external analytics tools

With the Ad Manager API, you can run reports that return a machine readable data file. This means that you can write an application that fetches your network’s reporting data, then feed that data into any analytics tools your business uses for up-to-date and actionable insights.

Many publishers have built reporting applications that run on a regular schedule so their data pipeline always has the most recent data. An example pipeline might be one that fetches Ad Manager reporting data via the API and writes the results to a database. Your business intelligence software can then read the data, combine it with your other business data, perform some analysis, and send out a summary email to interested parties.

Report and manage your key-values in bulk to optimize ad offerings

Key-values can give you more control over how you configure ads on your site. You can use them to identify pages, specific parts of a page, or other ad inventory. In order to report on key-values, each key-value must be added to your Ad Manager network and be marked as reportable. Using the API to keep these key-values updated can save a lot of time over entering them all manually.

Run inventory experiments with flexible forecasting

Monitoring your historical performance through reporting is only half of your optimization story. With the Ad Manager API, you can also evaluate future performance by running forecasts on existing and hypothetical line items. For example, you can run forecast simulations on a number of different line items that serve on different days and with different targeting configurations to compare how they stack up against each other.

Take a snapshot of your ad network

Sometimes it’s useful to have a local snapshot of your network’s orders, line items, etc. You can use this snapshot for quicker analyses since you can keep your data where your analytics are running, whether that’s on your in-house servers or in the cloud. Use the API to fetch only the most recently updated entities so that your snapshot stays as fresh as you need it.

Build a custom interface for your business

Perhaps you have an internal process that you’d like to streamline with a custom user interface or you have intelligence and analytics you’d like to sell to others. The Ad Manager API can connect your own network data or the data from other networks that grant your application access to a custom interface you build. The API offers read and write access to just about any entity you can access in the Ad Manager dashboard, giving you a range of configuration possibilities.

If you’re interested in building an Ad Manager API integration, you’ll find many resources on our developer documentation. We offer libraries to make getting started easy with support for Java, Python, PHP, .NET, and Ruby.

And if you have a development team that’s working on Ad Manager API integrations already, we host several Ad Manager Developer Workshops to take your integration to the next level. The next opportunity will be our London event on September 26, 2019.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Simplifying our content policies for publishers

One of our top priorities is to sustain a healthy digital advertising ecosystem, one that works for everyone: users, advertisers and publishers. On a daily basis, teams of Google engineers, policy experts, and product managers combat and stop bad actors. Just last year, we removed 734,000 publishers and app developers from our ad network and ads from nearly 28 million pages that violated our publisher policies.

But we’re not just stopping bad actors. Just as critical to our mission is the work we do every day to help good publishers in our network succeed. One consistent piece of feedback we’ve heard from our publishers is that they want us to further simplify our policies, across products, so they are easier to understand and follow. That’s why we'll be simplifying the way our content policies are presented to publishers, and standardizing content policies across our publisher products.

A simplified publisher experience

In September, we’ll update the way our publisher content policies are presented with a clear outline of the types of content where advertising is not allowed or will be restricted.

Our Google Publisher Policies will outline the types of content that are not allowed to show ads through any of our publisher products. This includes policies against illegal content, dangerous or derogatory content, and sexually explicit content, among others.

Our Google Publisher Restrictions will detail the types of content, such as alcohol or tobacco, that don’t violate policy, but that may not be appealing for all advertisers. Publishers will not receive a policy violation for trying to monetize this content, but only some advertisers and advertising products—the ones that choose this kind of content—will bid on it. As a result, Google Ads will not appear on this content and this content will receive less advertising than non-restricted content will.

The Google Publisher Policies and Google Publisher Restrictions will apply to all publishers, regardless of the products they use—AdSense, AdMob or Ad Manager.

These changes are the next step in our ongoing efforts to make it easier for publishers to navigate our policies so their businesses can continue to thrive with the help of our publisher products.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Next steps to ensure transparency, choice and control in digital advertising

Ads play a major role in sustaining the free and open web. They underwrite the great content and services that people enjoy and support a diverse universe of creators and publishers. But the ad-supported web is at risk if digital advertising practices don’t evolve to reflect people’s changing expectations around how data is collected and used.

The mission is clear: we need to ensure that people all around the world can continue to access ad supported content on the web while also feeling confident that their privacy is protected. As we shared in May, we believe the path to making this happen is also clear: increase transparency into how digital advertising works, offer users additional controls, and ensure that people’s choices about the use of their data are respected.

Working together across the ecosystem

The web ecosystem is complex—it includes users, publishers, advertisers, technology and service providers, advocacy groups, regulatory bodies and more. We’ve seen that approaches that don’t account for the whole ecosystem—or that aren’t supported by the whole ecosystem—will not succeed. For example, efforts by individual browsers to block cookies used for ads personalization without suitable, broadly accepted alternatives have fallen down on two accounts.

First, blocking cookies materially reduces publisher revenue. Based on an analysis of a randomly selected fraction of traffic on each of the 500 largest Google Ad Manager publishers globally over the last three months, we evaluated how the presence of a cookie affected programmatic revenue. Traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 52 percent less revenue for the publisher than traffic for which there was a cookie present. Lower revenue for traffic without a cookie was consistent for publishers across verticals—and was especially notable for publishers in the news vertical. For the news publishers in the studied group, traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 62 percent less revenue than traffic for which there was a cookie present.¹

Second, broad cookie restrictions have led some industry participants to use workarounds like fingerprinting, an opaque tracking technique that bypasses user choice and doesn’t allow reasonable transparency or control. Adoption of such workarounds represents a step back for user privacy, not a step forward.

Exploring new privacy-forward standards for the web

Today, Chrome shared an update on their efforts to explore new foundational technologies for the web that will deliver on the vision laid out above—widespread access to free content and strong privacy for users. Chrome has offered a number of preliminary proposals to the web standards community in areas such as conversion measurement, fraud protection and audience selection. The goal of these proposals is to promote a dialog on ways browsers could advance user privacy, while still ensuring publishers can earn what they need to fund great content and user experiences, and advertisers can deliver relevant ads to the right people and measure their impact.

Getting the web standards community to work on developing a new set of technologies is a tall order, but it’s not unprecedented. The community has worked together on a number of similar challenges over the years—such as gaining consensus to phase out browser plug-ins and reaching agreement to move away from Flash. We expect this will take years, not months, and we don’t anticipate any near-term changes to how our ads products work on Chrome. But this is important work and we support the effort.

Pursuing a new level of ads transparency and user control

While Chrome explores new technologies for the web, we’re also acting on the commitment we made in May of this year to increase the transparency of digital ads and offer users more control. Over the past few months, we’ve been listening to feedback from users and partners, and have arrived at an initial proposal to give people more visibility into and control of the data used for advertising. We’ve begun sharing this proposal for discussion to key industry and stakeholder groups and we’re eager to hear and incorporate feedback.

Whether it’s working with the standards community to explore a new set of technologies, or getting feedback from participants across the digital ads industry on a proposal to increase transparency and offer users more control, Google is committed to partnering with others to raise the bar for how data is collected and used. Only by working together can we define and implement new practices that result in better, more privacy-focused experiences for users while addressing the requirements of publishers and advertisers that fund and ensure access to free content on the web.

_{1. Google Ad Manager data; n=500 global publishers; Analysis based on an A/B experiment where cookies are disabled on a randomly selected fraction of each publisher's traffic; May-August 2019}

Source: The Official Google Blog

Growing in-app viewability coverage with Open Measurement

People are spending more time on their mobile phones, especially in apps, and move across screens frequently. As people’s usage of mobile apps has grown, so has the importance of standardizing the way viewability is measured on mobile devices.

Today we’re sharing how we’ve made in-app inventory more measurable through the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement standard. Integrating the Open Measurement Software Development Kit (SDK) into both our Google Mobile Ads (GMA) and Interactive Mobile Ads (IMA) SDKs has allowed us to enable Open Measurement on 85+ percent of in-app display and video impressions on Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager publishers. This means that buyers of this inventory can now take viewability measurements using solutions like Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Comscore, and Moat in addition to measurement that was previously available with Active View.

“IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement (OM) initiative makes it easier for ad buyers and sellers to work together for viewability measurement and other verification needs,” said Dennis Buchheim, Executive Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “The sell-side has been adopting OM quickly, and we ask brands, agencies, and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to get more active and take advantage of what OM offers.”

Advertisers can get started today by appending Open Measurement enabled tags from their viewability vendor of choice to their creatives.

Measurement vendors are lauding this development as progress for a more measurable future. Joseph Ranzenbach, Director of Product Management, IAS says, "Google's adoption of the Open Measurement SDK is a huge step in moving the industry forward and creating more transparency for advertisers." Sumit Shukla, SVP, Strategic Partnerships, Comscore says, "It’s important for Brands to consistently measure viewability across the entirety of their media buys. With Comscore’s cross-platform campaign measurement as a trusted market currency, this close partnership with Google further helps Brands measure what matters."

Viewability measurement unlocks high-performing In-app inventory for advertisers

Viewability continues to be an integral part of measuring ad effectiveness—it helps advertisers understand if their ad had the opportunity to be seen and it helps publishers offer more high-quality inventory.

In-app viewability means that advertisers can confidently take advantage of this high-value inventory. In 2018 we worked with Ipsos MORI to understand the impact of in-app advertising and found it was successful in driving action. People were 50 percent more likely to interact with a brand, buy a product or service, follow a call-to-action or recommend a brand to their family or friends after seeing its ad in an app, compared with those who saw it via a browser. Display & Video 360 customers can now confidently extend their brand campaigns to apps knowing they are able to measure ad viewability at the impression level as they would in other environments.

Publishers like Pandora recognize the importance of holistic viewability measurement. Maria Breza, VP, Ad Quality Measurement and Audience Data Operations at Pandora said, “Advertisers should be able to seamlessly use one viewability provider to measure their buys across all publishers and platforms. Open Measurement has allowed Pandora to make this a reality for our clients with less latency, less maintenance and more stability.”

What’s next for Open Measurement

We’re continuing to work with the IAB’s Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to expand Open Measurement to use cases beyond viewability, as well as to other environments such as web video. We believe Open Measurement has the potential to create a more transparent and accountable digital media ecosystem across all screens. Reach out to your measurement partners and Google representative to find out how you can take advantage of this new measurement technology.

Source: Google Ads

7 ways to grow programmatic video revenue with Google Ad Manager

Advances in programmatic video technology present exciting opportunities for publishers to package and sell their video inventory in new ways and ultimately increase efficiency, fill rates, and revenue. As advertisers continue to embrace video as their storytelling medium, and as programmatic spend increases, publishers can use this technology to grow their business.

Below are seven best practices my team has identified that can help you win with programmatic video. These best practices are based on our experience working with leading video partners and building programmatic technology that empowers publishers to deliver seamless, personalized, and measurable ad experiences everywhere.

Share more information about your inventory to drive more value

There’s a strong correlation between how much information you share about your video inventory and higher CPMs and fill rates. When video inventory contains viewability, brand safety, and demographic data, it’s more desirable to advertisers who want to reach audiences on premium content. As shared in our recent video viewability guide, increasing the viewability of your video ads from 50 percent to 90 percent, can result in more than an 80 percent revenue uplift (averaged across desktop and mobile sites) according to internal data.

If your video inventory contains signals like Device ID, App ID, Package Name, Show Name, TMSID, Description URL and Viewability signals it will likely drive the highest possible value for you and your advertising partners. When it comes to Device ID, Google Ad Manager supports the IAB's Identifier for Advertisers (IFA) guidelines and we recommend that partners adopt these guidelines to provide better ad experiences in a privacy-focused way.

Establish a responsible first-party data strategy

If you have first-party data or unique insights from your audiences or content that you have the right to use for advertising purposes, consider ways to use your custom data to help maximize the value of your programmatic inventory. Use Google Ad Manager’s audience solutions to help your advertising partners benefit from your first-party data whilst protecting against data leakage. This can improve advertising effectiveness and result in a high-quality advertising experience for audiences.

Create organizational alignment between direct and programmatic sales teams

One of the biggest challenges our broadcaster research revealed is achieving organizational alignment between direct and digital sales teams. Programmatic guaranteed deals represent a good opportunity to educate your sales organization on your programmatic offering and strategically cultivate relationships with agencies, demand-side platforms, and brands—with the benefit of improved efficiency. According to our programmatic guaranteed report, publishers save 57 percent more time when using Programmatic Guaranteed deals versus traditional reservations, all while maintaining the same level of control over their campaigns.

Create alignment by empowering your sales team to sell programmatic guaranteed video ads and compensate them for programmatic revenue.

Maximize yield across all transaction types

Google Ad Manager offers flexibility over how your inventory can be sold—including transaction types like Open Auction and Exchange Bidding. Partners like DAZN have been able to increase programmatic video revenue by 150 percent using Exchange Bidding for instream video. No matter how you sell, Ad Manager offers a unified platform with comprehensive yield management features that work across both direct and programmatic sales.

When it comes to pricing, we recommend:

Using Unified Pricing for Open Auction and Exchange Bidding to centrally manage your target CPM or floor prices across all programmatic demand.
Setting Programmatic Guaranteed pricing on par with your traditional reservation rate card.
Setting higher pricing for Programmatic Guaranteed with Audience Lists and for buyers who would like to retain the ability to pass on impressions through non-guaranteed private marketplaces.

Conduct technical video audits periodically

Technical errors can result in missed opportunities or cause a poor user experience. The Ad Manager technical consultant team, that works with partners to identify and fix video issues, recommends your audit include the following steps:

Review sites and apps for latency, render rates, and prefetching opportunities.
Audit for VAST errors, timeout windows, and issues passing user agent.
Use Ad Manager inventory controls, like the ability to block VPAID creatives on connected TV devices, or create network level duration settings and player profiles for a better ad experience.
Use Ad Manager’s Dynamic Ad Insertion to ensure a seamless experience across content and ads.

Maintain your brand with Ad Manager's publisher protections

Maintain your brand by using Ad Manager’s spam protections, including standards like Ads.txt and apps-ads.txt. You can reduce the risk of fraud by sending all programmatic video inventory to Ad Manager through the Interactive Media Ads SDK. We also recommend using Ad Manager’s Ad Review Center to review individual ads and decide whether you want to continue showing them on your pages or blog, or report ads in real-time.

With these protections in place, you can rest assured that you’ve taken steps to minimize the risk that your inventory will be compromised by bad actors, and advertisers will increasingly feel comfortable that the video inventory they buy through Ad Manager is from the declared, trusted source they set out to run on.

Grow your revenue with Ad Manager’s demand-side connections

Google Ad Manager can also help you grow awareness and revenue for your inventory through our integrated demand-side connections to Google Authorized Buyers, including Display & Video 360, Google Ads, and agencies. You can easily strike curated deals through your publisher profile in Ad Manager. Our teams may also be able to help you highlight your inventory in the Display and Video 360 Marketplace program or by incorporating your brand in other marketing programs throughout the year.

Implementing these best practices can help you successfully monetize your video programmatically, grow demand from advertisers, and allow you to continue to create more great content for audiences everywhere.

Learn more on the Google Ad Manager website.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Support for app-ads.txt to protect your app revenue and brand

To help build a safe and transparent advertising ecosystem, we’re introducing support for app-ads.txt across Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager. This will help app publishers prevent their inventory from being spoofed by bad actors while ensuring advertiser spend reaches the intended audience.

What is app-ads.txt?

App-ads.txt is a standard released by the IAB Tech Lab that helps prevent unauthorized or domain-spoofed app inventory from being transacted across mobile, connected TV, and other devices. It defines a simple method for app publishers to publicly declare who is authorized to sell or resell their digital advertising inventory. App-ads.txt is an extension of the original ads.txt standard that was first published by the IAB in 2017. The ads.txt standard is one of the most successful industry standards and is now widely adopted by web publishers.

Google’s support for IAB Tech Lab’s app-ads.txt

We’ve actively contributed to the specification of app-ads.txt since the beginning and will support the standard across all relevant products including AdMob and Ad Manager. Starting August 27, 2019, we will begin to block ad serving of unauthorized app inventory in both AdMob and Ad Manager as identified by a publisher’s app-ads.txt file.

We strongly encourage you to create an app-ads.txt file and publish it to the developer domain you have listed in your App Store and/or Google Play store listing. This will help prevent unauthorized and domain-spoofed app inventory from damaging your brand and revenue. Publishers who do not implement an app-ads.txt file will see no changes to their ad serving, but they will not benefit from these added spoofing protections.

How to prepare for the enforcement

Correct implementation of app-ads.txt will help protect your inventory against bad actors. Implementation errors could cause interruptions to ad serving, so it is very important for you to verify that the app-ads.txt file you publish on your developer domain contains all your valid property codes before August 27.

To prepare for the upcoming enforcement rollout, simply follow the steps below. You can find more details in our Help Center guides (AdMob, Ad Manager).

Provide a developer website URL in app store listings on Google Play or the App Store
Publish an app-ads.txt file in the root directory of your site (e.g. example.com/app-ads.txt)
Include all authorized publisher codes for the networks your app sells through in the file

Once you finish implementing the app-ads.txt file, we encourage you to carefully review it to ensure that it contains lines in the following format:

google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT

As the sample line shows, your app-ads.txt file should include the name of the ad network you are working with (e.g. ‘google.com’) as the domain name and you should replace the publisher ID with your property code.

To help you verify correct file implementation, we are currently rolling out verifications and warnings in the user interface for both AdMob and Ad Manager when errors are detected. The warnings will appear if we detect your publisher ID is missing from your app-ads.txt file.

app-ads.txt Alerts Mock in Ad Manager — Example of error notifications in Ad Manager

Example of error notification in AdMob — Example of error notifications in AdMob

There will be no interruption to your ad serving should you choose not to implement the app-ads.txt file on your developer website, but your app may be at risk of inventory spoofing which could result in revenue loss.

By supporting the new app-ads.txt standard, AdMob and Ad Manager will help you better protect your revenue and brand.