New Ad Exchange features to help improve your revenue

The new features relate to the deals that can be set up between buyers and sellers in Ad Exchange, particularly Private Auction deals. In a Private Auction Deal, the publisher selects specific buyers that get access to bid on (selected parts of) their inventory starting at a pre-determined floor price. The selected buyers get access to the publishers’ inventory in the Private Auction Deal before Open Auction buyers do, and of course, this privilege should come at a price. It is Google’s recommendation to let the bids start at a price roughly two to three times more than the average eCPM received through branded bids in the Open Auction over the last 30 days on the same inventory. This data can be accessed through the query tool in AdX.

Private Auction Deals therefore are a great tool to increase your overall revenue. Yet at the same time, since your inventory in the Open Auction is accessible to more buyers (bidders) than the Private Auction Deal, it is very possible that even when the Open Auction floor price is set far below the Private Auction floor price, the winning eCPM is still higher. That is, a higher number of bidders increase the auction pressure and can thereby in theory, push the eCPM up far above a winning bid in the Private Auction.

On practical terms, this means that while you may have set up your Private Auction to get a higher eCPM, you may actually be able to get more through the Open Auction due to the higher number of bids and therefore increased auction pressure. Obviously this does not often happen, and generally the average eCPM received through the Private Auction deal is higher than the average eCPM in the Open Auction. Yet it is the case on some occasions – and that is actually a lost opportunity!

Fortunately one of the new features that has been introduced is that you can now tick the box to allow Open Auction buyer optimisation when setting up a Private Auction Deal in Ad Exchange.

By enabling this feature, Open Auction bids can also compete with bids for this Private Auction. Not only does it give Open Auction buyers a chance to compete for ad requests previously unavailable to them due to the prioritisation of Private Auction bid, as the publisher you will be maximising your overall revenue through the increased competition.

Sounds pretty amazing right? And there is no real downside to it. For this reason, Open Auction competition is enabled by default for individual Private Auctions. If you wish, you can disable this setting for specific Private Auctions. This is useful when for example you’d like to provide only your selected Private Auction buyers with access to this particular part of your inventory.

The second feature that was recently introduced in DoubleClick Ad Exchange is the possibility to allow all buyers to be able to discover your Private Auction deals in the Marketplace. Importantly, buyers will not see the floor price that you set for the buyers that you initially invited to the deal, but they will see the inventory that is available and they can apply to join the deal and negotiate the floor price directly with you.

Similarly, buyers using the DoubleClick Marketplace can now contact publishers directly by sending through a proposal stating their goals and inventory needs. These proposal requests appear in the ‘Action required’ section of the ‘Offers’ menu in the ‘Deals’ tab. It is important that you as the publisher make sure that your email address in your account settings is up-to-date as you are also notified by email when each request is sent.

In short, as the publisher you can significantly improve your revenue by allowing Open Auction buyer optimisation and by permitting all buyers to discover your Private Auction deals in the Marketplace. And that with only two mouse clicks – it really is no big deal!

1. For more information on the Ad Exchange auction model, see https://support.google.com/adxseller/answer/152039.
2. For more information on how to increase auction pressure and to thereby increase your overall revenue, see https://support.google.com/adxseller/topic/6123090?hl=en&ref_topic=6122829.