Google’s DoubleClick has announced a number of changes that will improve performance measurement and programmatic direct capabilities across its suite of ad buying technology.
At the DoubleClick Leadership Summit last week in Key Biscayne, FL Google said that DoubleClick now supports guarantee-based programmatic direct transactions between advertisers and publishers. That means publishers can give selected advertisers exclusive access to premium inventory at pre-negotiated rates, with the option to programmatically pick and choose which specific visitors they want to target at the time the ad runs.
With guarantees on these types of orders, the advertiser is able to pre-book selected premium inventory, to ensure they get the scale and the placements they want. During the campaign they’re able to selectively fill the order with ads that reach only the audience they want.
Programmatic direct sold with this kind of guarantee – also called “programmatic reserve” or “programmatic guaranteed” – allows the buyer to secure high-quality inventory from trusted publishers and to do so with the efficiency and targeting of programmatic as well as the reliable scale of a direct buy. The tradeoff is that programmatic reserve usually comes at direct sales prices; Google says that publishers regularly attract CPMs 15 times higher than open market rates.
But that hasn’t stopped buyers in Canada, where programmatic direct has been growing at a much faster rate than open-marketplace RTB. Globally, DoubleClick VP of display media Neal Mohan wrote in a blog post about the new features that the volume of programmatic direct transactions on DoubleClick has doubled in the past year. He said that eight of the top 25 publishers on DoubleClick are now selling 10% or more of their inventory through programmatic direct and that there’s been a lot of demand for tools to sell that inventory on a guaranteed basis.
Many platforms like Index Exchange and OpenX already support programmatic reserve, but it’s still a big deal that it’s coming to DoubleClick, since it is likely the most-used supply-side platform and ad server on the market.
The second big change that Google announced was that it is embedding cross-device conversion measurement across its DoubleClick advertiser suite. That means that programmatic media buyers will be able to track customer journeys that start on one device, but result in a conversion on a different one.
Cross-device conversions for search ads came out back in 2013, and Google has been using it to demonstrate the effectiveness of mobile and cross-device search ads. Mohan said that search advertisers have been able to track 16% more conversions on average when using cross-device measurement.
DoubleClick also now supports native ad formats for mobile and web publishers, allowing them to custom design in-feed ads for their sites and apps. Once the template has been designed, DoubleClick will sell the placements at large scale through programmatic channels and auto-generate the final ad creative based on information suppied by advertisers.
Google is not the first supply-side platform to add native capabilities – OpenX launched a mobile native exchange a year ago, as did Rubicon – but when Google gets on board, it’s clear the technology could be the market standard going forward.
