Filling your CTV ad break with Google Ad Manager
An estimated 86% of Connected TV (CTV) inventory is bought programmatically 1 and publishers are looking for ways to connect with this massive pool of new buyers.
Today, we're bringing you a suite of tools designed to help capture more demand, optimize your revenue and strategically differentiate your offering to stand out with buyers.
Connect with buyers on your terms
Google Ad Manager empowers you to share the contextual and audience signals that help video buyers meet their goals, while offering granular controls to determine when, where and to whom your signals are shared. For example, you can share standardized data like genre, content rating and viewer demographics through Publisher Provided Signals (PPS) — a feature that's been helping buyers gain a deeper understanding of CTV audiences and content. To help improve ads personalization and measurement, share publisher-provided identifiers (PPID) and any other secure signals you collect with trusted buyers.
We’ve been investing in giving you more ways to connect with buyers and access demand. For example, we developed tools that enhance agency-publisher engagement including new curation capabilities. These make it easier for agencies to find and buy the ideal audiences for their campaigns, matching your CTV inventory with the right marketers.
We're also introducing direct payments for Open Bidding to provide another way to access demand from third-party exchanges directly in your ad server on Ad Manager. Built on Open Bidding's real-time bidding integrations, direct payments allow you to maintain a direct billing integration with exchange partners. This reclassifies the supply path in Sellers.json to indicate a direct relationship, which can unlock spend from buyers seeking the most efficient path to CTV inventory.
With increased programmatic demand, maintaining a high advertising standard in-line with your brand can be challenging. Google Ad Manager’s Ad Review Center has new features that provide you with greater transparency into every programmatic creative. For example, use custom creative labels to simplify workflows and make it easy to categorize and review creatives. In the coming months, we'll introduce enhanced video review features. These will allow you to review ads based on transcript and volume levels, helping you block unwanted or excessively loud ads. And if you’re seeking greater control, use manual creative review to pre-approve every ad.
Optimize for revenue and user engagement
The next step in making the most of your CTV inventory is optimizing your commercial breaks to drive revenue and improve user experience.
We’re introducing server-side unwrapping (SSU), which streamlines tag-based integrations through VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) by following VAST redirect chains within the ad server. Since those redirects might result in errors and increased latency, SSU optimizes to catch errors early and enables packing ad pods with the best available ads. Through the VAST response, Google Ad Manager uses ad data such as duration, bid price, and advertiser domain to ensure opportunities are filled with verified, de-duplicated creatives to yield maximum revenue. In testing with partners, SSU reduced error rates by 83%, leading to smoother ad delivery and increased revenue.
And with our new fill-rate optimization tool, you can prioritize your inventory and direct demand budgets towards your most valuable traffic. For example, you can prioritize filling prime-time live traffic over daytime VOD traffic, and Google Ad Manager will maximize delivery on these segments.
Harnessing the power of Google AI, Google Ad Manager also helps you optimize your ad breaks by maximizing revenue per second (RPS) while still offering linear controls over ad placements and user experience. Control how often viewers see specific advertisers or ad categories with expanded frequency capping and competitive exclusion settings aimed at resolving cross-channel conflicts (currently in beta). To further test and refine your approach, use A/B experiments for Ad Rules to find the right balance between revenue and user engagement through different ad loads and ad break structures.
We're continually investing in innovations to help you maximize your CTV revenue, and publishers can start testing these tools and increasing their growth today. We will have more developments to share in the New Year — including new CTV ad formats and performance-driven demand tools.
