People’s expectations for online privacy have changed, making it essential that digital advertising evolves to better meet their needs. That’s why we’ve been investing in durable solutions to help publishers of all sizes grow their businesses in privacy-forward ways. To help our partners prepare for the future, we’re sharing details on new and updated features that give publishers added control of their first-party data and how they can share it with their advertising partners.

Make your first-party data more accessible to programmatic buyers

Publishers have always had the most relevant insights about the audiences visiting their sites and apps, along with information about the content they consume. But there hasn't been an easy way for publishers to make use of this information with programmatic buyers outside of direct reservations.

We’re introducing publisher provided signals to help you categorize your first-party data into consistent audience or contextual segments and then share these signals with programmatic buyers. These signals make it easier for programmatic buyers to find and purchase audiences based on things like demographics, content interests or purchase intent across multiple sites and apps without tracking people’s activity in apps or across the web.

To help publishers and buyers find value and easily use these new first-party signals, we are working to incorporate industry standards. As a first step, we are integrating the IAB Tech Lab’s Seller Defined Audiences into this solution. Publishers can use the IAB’s Audience Taxonomy and Content Taxonomy to share signals with Google Ads and Display & Video 360 as part of our beta testing. In the future, we’ll roll out publisher provided signals to more publishers and Authorized Buyers and Open Bidders. We look forward to incorporating their feedback into the product development.

“Seller Defined Audiences was created by the advertising industry via Project Rearc, to help advertisers and publishers responsibly and reliably share first-party data at scale without the need for user identifiers. It's a great step forward to have Google Ad Manager adopt these new standards for their publisher partners, and help advance a new system for addressability and accountability that meets user privacy expectations.”

– Anthony Katsur, CEO IAB Tech Lab

Share secure signals with your trusted partners

We’ve also been working with publishers to improve a feature that allows them to securely share signals with their trusted third-party buying partners – Authorized Buyers and Open Bidders. During our beta testing, we heard feedback from publishers and third-party buyers that you’d like more flexibility with this feature. That’s why we’re adding new controls and renaming the tool from encrypted signals to secure signals to better reflect how you can choose to implement its functionality.

Currently, publishers work with third parties to set up code on their websites and apps to activate this feature. This new expanded functionality will let publishers use their own code, making it easier for them to create and send data, like first-party identifiers, to trusted partners.

Secure signals still gives publishers full control over what data is collected and who can receive the signals. When passed through Google Ad Manager, the data is required to be obfuscated, meaning Google cannot read or use the signals. Ad Manager only acts as an intermediary on behalf of the publisher to pass the signals to their chosen third-party bidders.

We understand that you work directly with many third parties to maximize the value of your content. That’s why we will continue to support these trusted, direct relationships and build solutions to help you monetize your inventory in the best way for your business.

Deliver more relevant app ads with same app key

The growing desire for privacy isn’t unique to the web. Any publisher who has an app should also be exploring privacy-preserving solutions to increase the value of its app inventory as well. That’s why in the coming months we’ll update a feature called same app key to help publishers using Ad Manager serve relevant ads on iOS without tracking users across third-party apps.

Same app key uses first-party data collected from your apps, such as information about how users interact with ads inside your app. It can’t be used to link user activity from your apps to third-party apps.

Get up to speed on ads privacy and our privacy safe solutions

In addition to the new capabilities we shared above, we’re committed to helping publishers of all sizes navigate the evolving privacy environment. You’ll find new resources below to help you learn about industry-wide privacy changes, develop new privacy-forward strategies for using data and decide which Google solutions are right for you.

• Publisher Privacy Playbook - Learn about the digital ads ecosystem, get practical strategies for improving your ads privacy and an overview of Google’s solutions for publishers.
• See how other publishers are preparing for the future of privacy. Working with Deloitte, we commissioned new studies to better understand how top European publishers are adapting to the ads privacy landscape and how North American publishers are turning to first-party data to prepare for the future.
• Learn how to use key values to earn more from your first-party data in this series on the Ad Manager YouTube channel.
• Level up your knowledge of Ad Manager’s first-party data solutions and earn an award on our Skillshop learning platform by completing the Privacy-forward Solutions for Publishers learning path.
• Lastly, learn more about the privacy forward solutions available in Google Ad Manager, like Publisher Provided Identifiers by watching webinars at PublishersOnAir.withGoogle.com.

Ad Manager program policies help ensure we preserve a healthy digital ecosystem for the benefit of all users, advertisers and publishers. But we know we can do more to help Ad Manager partners better understand our policies. So, to answer some common questions, we’re sharing a new infographic with important information on:

• The role of advertising policies for Google’s advertising platforms
• Most frequently faced policy violations
• Resolving policy issues and navigating through the Ad Manager Policy Center

Check it out below, and don't forget to download or bookmark the infographic below.

What if managing your video streaming business didn’t have to be so complex? What if your team didn’t have to dig through data across devices, apps, live streams and video on-demand to find insights?

We’ve built new solutions in Ad Manager to simplify these processes and save publishers time — helping you automatically uncover new opportunities, manage all your video streams with flexibility and ultimately grow your video revenue.

Automatically uncover new insights

Ad Manager already provides video-specific tools and time-based metrics to help you understand the true potential of every commercial break. But making sense of your video reporting data and finding insights for your business can be a challenging, manual task.

Our new Programmatic Video Health Tools save time by highlighting opportunities you may have missed, right when you log into your account. These granular insights can help you determine why some inventory performs better than others at auction.

The programmatic video signals card automatically generates a snapshot of how your video inventory is performing. It shows signals that are important to advertisers, such as viewability, app or web domain name and audience information — plus their impact on revenue. These three dimensions make it easier for advertisers to value your inventory and can help you grow your revenue by identifying where these metrics can improve. Globally, publishers with high programmatic inventory signal coverage see an average 25% revenue uplift compared to inventory with low programmatic inventory signal coverage.[be2de3]

We’ve heard from publishers that error reporting for lost ad requests (that can directly impact revenue) requires a lot of manual tasks across multiple video-specific reports. With the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) errors insights card, Ad Manager uses automation to quickly show you the number of errors on your inventory and which line items are causing the errors, so you don’t have to spend time running a custom report.

You can even sort the list of line items to find errors with the highest impact on revenue. By surfacing these actionable error insights early, the VAST error insights card can help you increase revenue by fixing misconfigured settings or broken creatives.

Lastly, because we know every publisher has unique business needs, we’ll release a Video Performance Alerts solution to beta to help you automate insights based on specific requirements. With Video Performance Alerts, you’ll be able to create customized email alerts for your choice of campaign metrics and dimensions. For example, you can create an alert for when total impressions across a line item drops below an expected daily threshold. So instead of constantly logging in to check on campaign performance, you’ll get notified automatically.

Identify and fix problems faster with new reporting tools

Quickly finding a problem will help you resolve it sooner and earn more revenue. This is especially important during traffic spikes from large audiences tuning into new episodes or live events. So we created real-time video reporting to help you quickly get the information you need.

With real-time video reporting, we’ve improved historical ad serving data availability by 10x, shortening the time to access performance data to under two minutes — so you can get ad unit or line item level data to find and fix errors before the next commercial break. Keep an eye out for new solutions over the coming quarters to help you identify and solve issues in real time.

For publishers serving ads to their content on YouTube with Ad Manager, we’ve launched a new troubleshooting tool to open beta. With the YouTube ads delivery tool, you can test ad delivery on YouTube inventory. It lets you see data like ad requests, key-values and details for the winning line items to help you validate and fix issues. To make sure everything is behaving and delivering as expected, you can even test line items and simulate requests.

Supporting your video streaming growth

We hope these new automated solutions and faster reporting tools give you the time and space to focus on growing your business. Look out for more updates this year to help you improve troubleshooting, test your set up and find more insights.

Publishers have a wide range of options to monetize their content online. That's why we’ve built flexibility and a variety of features into Google Ad Manager, giving publishers choice in how they sell ads on their properties. One way many of them choose to sell their inventory is through header bidding, which runs an auction among multiple ad exchanges on a user’s device before calling the publisher’s ad server. Today, about 90% of large publishers use header bidding,[539f3f]with many using a mix of header bidding and server-side solutions like Open Bidding to maximize revenue.

While Ad Manager has always enabled publishers to use header bidding, today we’re introducing new features to improve header bidding support. These updates make it easier for publishers to manage the process and provide new insights on ad performance.

An easier setup process

The current process to set up header bidding can be resource-heavy and time consuming, requiring publishers to set up and manage hundreds to thousands of line items and ad creatives. To simplify this, we’ve developed a new way for publishers to set up header bidding through yield groups.[083ff2]In just a few steps, publishers can make their ad space available to header bidders — similar to how they can specify what ad space they want to sell with Ad Exchange or Open Bidding. The header bidding demand is then included in the unified auction.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working with publishers to test this optional feature and incorporate their feedback into the development process. Over the next couple of weeks, we will open this beta to more publishers and move to open beta this summer.

“The new workflow has made our process of setting up header bidders significantly simpler, allowing our team to focus on more strategic work.”

Evan Pfeffer, VP Programmatic Solutions, Bustle Digital Group

“Using Ad Manager’s yield groups for header bidding solves for the complex setup and maintenance issues when using an independent auction like Prebid. It’s a strong feature and should be considered by any publisher who is intimidated by the technical aspects of header bidding."

Steve Mummey, SVP Digital Ad Revenue & Technology, AccuWeather

"It's been great to partner with Google to test its improved support for header bidding in Ad Manager. Google Ad Manager and Prebid are both important to our business. This enhanced communication between them is an exciting development, and we anticipate this feature will simplify set up work for our ad operations team.”

Patrick McCann, SVP Research, CafeMedia

"We are excited to see Google making strides towards simplifying the header bidding workflow; it's an important step for our industry and one that gives publishers the power of choice. We look forward to working with the team to ensure our publisher partners are able to take advantage of this solution, save time and resources and ultimately drive higher yield."

Mike McNeeley, SVP Product, Index Exchange

Improved reporting for all demand sources

We’ve been working on additional reporting features to give publishers greater insights on header bidding performance. A few months ago, we introduced a new type of Data Transfer file, which shows publishers the amount buyers would have needed to bid in order to win the auction.[083ff2]This allows publishers to share data related to outcomes from Ad Manager auctions with all buyers they work with, including their header bidding partners.

We’re also developing a new reporting feature to provide greater performance insights to publishers who continue to use line items to set up header bidding. Over the next few weeks, we’ll release demand subchannel reporting. With this new feature, Ad Manager will automatically detect which line items are being used for header bidding — allowing publishers to more easily compare header bidding performance alongside their other demand sources.

Greater choice and control for publishers

We strive to give our partners flexibility and choice to best support their business goals. That’s why Ad Manager has always given publishers the option to integrate with the advertising technologies they choose, and we continue to focus on evolving our platform to meet our partners’ needs.

As part of an overall resolution of the French Competition Authority’s (FCA) investigation, we’ve been working with regulators and publishers to develop these features, making it easier to make use of data and use our tools with other ad technologies. While we still believe header bidding presents drawbacks such as latency and a poor user experience, among others, we remain committed to providing publishers with choice through product interoperability.

We look forward to continuing to test and build on these features with publishers over the coming months, and sharing progress along the way.

In the third episode of our Publisher Privacy Q&A series, we’re talking about first-party data and its important role in the privacy-centric future of digital advertising.

Questions covered in episode 3:

1. What is first-party data?
2. How does first-party data differ from third-party data?
3. Why is first-party data important?
4. How can publishers use their first-party data to grow advertising revenue?

Stay tuned for the fourth Publisher Privacy Q&A episode coming in March. In the meantime, check out episodes 1 and 2 of this series.