Marketers and agencies sign annual deals with top publishers to simplify purchasing and negotiating inventory across multiple brands and campaigns. This includes annual upfronts and newfronts deals. Increasingly, marketers rely on Programmatic Guaranteed and other non-guaranteed deals to fulfill these commitments with Display & Video 360, because its frequency management capabilities improve performance while delivering consistent user experiences across channels.

To help media agency professionals more efficiently manage publisher deals, we’re introducing new tools to package, prioritize and monitor deals across partners and advertisers in Display & Video 360.

Let’s say you’ve negotiated a deal with a publisher and you’d like to use it across different partner accounts. Instead of going into each of Display & Video 360’s partner accounts and creating separate deals, you can now create one deal and then distribute impressions across partners and advertisers. You can also easily edit the deal and the changes will propagate to all Display & Video 360’s accounts you shared the deal with.

Package and prioritize deals across partner accounts

In addition to saving time creating and editing deals, you can also package the inventory to fit the needs of the brands you work with. You can take inventory from different deals, bundle them together and give access across partners and advertisers. For example, you can create a package for a special time of year (like Black Friday or major sporting event), a marketing objective or for always-on campaigns and share it across multiple partners. This way you don’t have to recreate the same package in multiple accounts. In addition, for preferred deals, you can prioritize access to the deal across partners and advertisers, giving you additional control in how you distribute impressions from the deal among your various campaigns.

Monitor publisher commitments in one place

When you commit to buying a fixed amount of ad inventory through a Programmatic Guaranteed or a non-guaranteed deal, you have to closely monitor its delivery so that you don’t waste your budgets. The ability to keep track of your spend at the publisher level is particularly relevant for your upfront deals that span across various properties and cover different advertisers and campaigns. So if these deals are running behind, it’s important to quickly reallocate impressions across campaigns. Now, you can easily monitor pacing for each publisher and deal in one place, identify delivery issues and reallocate impressions across accounts and campaigns before the deal expires.

To access these new tools, please contact your account team. In the future, we’re planning to add more controls and flexibility in how you manage your deals across partners.

With uncertainty about what will come next and many teams still working from home, marketers tell us they are looking for ways to make every advertising dollar count while also increasing operational efficiency. Programmatic Guaranteed in Display & Video 360 helps you achieve both. First, it gives you a more productive way to engage with your audiences than traditional reservations by increasing reach for the same budget. Second, it reduces the manual work required to set up deals by automating many steps of the campaign management workflow. Today we’re improving Programmatic Guaranteed by adding support for Google Audiences so you can reach people with more precision, giving you more control over how you execute your media buy, and expanding access to premium inventory.

Support for Google Audiences

To make sure you’re only reaching the people who are likely to be interested in your products, Programmatic Guaranteed now supports Google Audiences. This means that you can drive higher ROI by reaching the specific groups of consumers who are most likely to respond to your message based on Google’s unique understanding of intent, in addition to improving reach and efficiency.

For example, if you’re an automotive company planning a campaign to launch a new all-wheel drive vehicle, you can create a deal with a top news publisher to only show ads to outdoor and winter sports enthusiasts. Support for Google Audiences works on all Programmatic Guaranteed deals with Google Ad Manager publishers. Access to affinity segments is available now and we will add support for in-market audiences in the coming months.

New reservation features

We’re also bringing some of the most requested advertiser features from traditional reservations to Programmatic Guaranteed. First, we’ve introduced makegoods, so if a campaign doesn’t go according to plans, publishers will be able to offer extra impressions to make up for delivery issues. Second, in addition to cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) and cost-per day (CPD) sponsorships, you’ll be able to set up the sponsorship by day part or percent of share of voice.

For example, let’s say that you’re a telco operator and have a special offer for Black Friday that starts at 6 PM on Thanksgiving day. With this new feature, you’re able to reserve all impressions available between 6 PM and midnight on Thanksgiving day for the publishers that you have negotiated deals with. You could also decide to run the same promotion on 20 percent of the impressions available throughout the entire day.

Expanded access to premium inventory

In addition to publishers using Google Ad Manager, Programmatic Guaranteed is also available for publisher inventory on several popular third-party exchanges. And we’ve recently added access to four new exchanges: FreeWheel, Kargo, Smartclip and Xandr. When planning for your next campaign, you’ll have access to even more premium reservation inventory that you can buy programmatically.

With these new features, Programmatic Guaranteed will help you reach more of the people who are most likely to be interested in your products while giving you the same controls of direct reservations. If you want to learn more, you can take our latest Skillshop training module on Programmatic Guaranteed, or speak with your account team.

Recently, marketers have asked us how they can support multicultural publishers, including those owned by members of the Black and Latino communities.

For example, the team at GroupM shared that they’re eager to drive change in this area. “We’ve seen a lot of interest from marketers who want to be more inclusive with their advertising budgets,” said Gonzalo del Fa, president of GroupM Multicultural. “But it’s difficult to discover and engage with multicultural publishers. At GroupM, we’ve made it a priority to support the content created by these communities, and we’re always looking for new ways to foster that support.”

As part of Google’s commitment to support Black and Latino-owned publishers, we're introducing new ways for marketers to discover and support a more diverse set of publishers in Display & Video 360's Marketplace.

First, when accessing Marketplace you will soon find auction packages with a clear indicator that they feature inventory from multicultural publishers. Working in coordination with our Display & Video 360 exchange partners, these publishers have self-identified as being owned by members of multicultural communities and have opted to participate in this program. Second, we’ll use the same indicators to make it easier to discover properties in Marketplace owned by members of multicultural communities so you can easily select and add such properties to your media plans.

As always, Display & Video 360 doesn’t permit advertisers to personalize ads based on categories such as race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, per our policies, and this program does not change anything in that regard. Rather, these new features simply help marketers who would like to support businesses owned by self-identified members of multicultural communities find such inventory.

We’re rolling out these changes in the coming weeks for U.S. advertisers, starting by highlighting Black-owned publishers, and we'll soon expand to additional groups. For publishers that are Black-owned, we’re working with the following exchanges to highlight this inventory in Display & Video 360: Google Ad Manager, GumGum, Kargo, Magnite, TripleLift, Verizon Media, Xandr and YieldMo.

As we expand this effort to highlight other multicultural groups, we’ll continue to explore new ways to allow marketers to support content from a diverse set of publishers.

Media consumption habits are rapidly changing. Planning tools that are tightly connected to your media buying platform can help you reassess your media plans and quickly adjust your ad strategy to reach people where they are now.

We’re expanding the reach forecasting capabilities in Display & Video 360 to offer a deduplicated view of expected campaign reach across open auction display, video and YouTube so that media planners can have a comprehensive and accurate view of their potential audience. And to better support collaboration between planning and buying teams, the planning workspace is now more easily accessible to media planners, thanks to a new dedicated user role.

A deduplicated view of your Display & Video 360 reach 

Media planners aim to get the most comprehensive view of all the media available so they can design relevant and effective plans. In Display & Video 360, you could already forecast the reach of your video campaigns in the plan workspace. For planners to effectively plan across all their programmatic buys, we have added support for display formats.

That means that media planners no longer have to rely on reach metrics from past campaigns to guesstimate the reach of their upcoming display ad campaigns. They can now rely on display forecasts that take into account insights that are unique to Display & Video 360 such as brand safety settings and Google audience details. For example, it is now possible to accurately estimate the reach of a display campaign aimed at reaching the Google affinity audience “Aspiring Chefs” as they enjoy content suitable for general audiences.

But the primary objective of media planning is to understand how many people are likely to be exposed to your brand across formats and inventory. So building on Google's Unique Reach methodology, we also enabled fully deduplicated reach forecasts in Display & Video 360 across open auction display, open auction video and YouTube.

With this capability, you can now answer questions such as “how many unique people can I expect to reach with my overall campaign across any open auction display and video inventory as well as YouTube?” In addition to reach, you can also see projections for other important campaign metrics such as frequency, viewability and cost as you plan. And you can see how many people you will reach if you apply Google audience segments or if you choose to use your own audience data.

A dedicated user role for planners

Media planners are increasingly being held accountable for how well an ad campaign actually delivers against the plan that was shared with clients or other teams. As a result, we are seeing stronger collaboration across media planning and buying teams.

To help foster this collaboration, we just introduced a dedicated user role for media planners. For the first time, agencies and advertisers can invite their media planners directly into Display & Video 360. This new role enables access just to the relevant elements of Display & Video 360 for media planners, giving them visibility into the critical media planning information they need to collaborate, learn, iterate and build more impactful media plans.

For example, media planners can access accurate forecasts for campaigns bought programmatically in Display & Video 360 and discover new publishers and inventory. With the Partner account owner’s permission, they can also start a negotiation with a publisher or renegotiate an existing deal. This gives them tools to better inform their planning process and freedom to check and update their plans and recommendations whenever they need.

Before launching your next programmatic campaign, give your media planning team access to the Display & Video 360 planning workspace so they can accurately estimate how many people are likely to be exposed to your brand across formats and inventory, and design the best media plan to deliver on your objectives.

Frequency management helps marketers and agency partners deliver a better user experience and reduce budget waste by controlling the number of times people see their ads. That’s why, when we introduced Programmatic Guaranteed in Display & Video 360 a few years ago, we gave you a way to manage ad frequency across these deals and your open auction buys together. Once you reached your frequency goal for a specific user across both buys, the open auction portion of the campaign would stop showing ads to that user. However, Programmatic Guaranteed would continue to serve ads to a user beyond your frequency goal until you reached the total number of impressions secured in the deal, consistent with a traditional reservation deal.

Now we’re improving how frequency management works for Programmatic Guaranteed deals in Display & Video 360. Once your overall campaign frequency goal has been reached for a user, whether via open auction, Programmatic Guaranteed, or a combination of the two, Display & Video 360 will attempt to stop showing more ads to that user from your Programmatic Guaranteed deals while still prioritizing and ensuring that they deliver the agreed number of impressions. This will further reduce overexposure, resulting in an even better experience for users and less waste for advertisers.

Keep your campaigns running longer

Monitor efficiency gains in real-time

We're also introducing a new dashboard that shows you how many wasted impressions you are avoiding - and budget you are reinvesting to reach new users - for each Programmatic Guaranteed deal using Display & Video 360's frequency management tools. Having a real-time view of budget savings gives marketers and agency partners more control and precision in evaluating their campaign performance.

You can also access the same information aggregated across multiple deals, by creating an offline report with the Programmatic Guaranteed savings template in the standard Display & Video 360 reporting.

If you want to get more control over ad frequency, set a frequency goal at the campaign level and all of the campaign’s insertion orders, including the ones with Programmatic Guaranteed deals, will take that goal into account. And once the campaign is running, you can easily see how the new feature is making the most of your budget with the new dashboard.