New third-party verification in Google Marketing Platform

With current events changing so quickly, advertisers constantly reassess if all of the creative elements for their various campaigns—tone, copy, visuals, placements—are appropriate. They also want to know if their ads are viewable and if they are running in environments that are suitable for their brand. Partners can help solve these brand suitability challenges.

To make it easier to work with these partners, we are introducing automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager and custom pre-bid filtering in Display & Video 360. 

Automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager

Now you can seamlessly add third-party brand verification measurement to the ads you serve with Campaign Manager. You can still use Campaign Manager’s built-in Verification suite, but can now add third-party verification to your campaigns faster.

The previous process required multiple teams working in spreadsheets to add third-party verification to each placement on your media plan. This required a lot of resources and often resulted in reporting discrepancies. Automated third-party verification is faster and less error-prone because it uses system-to-system API calls between Google and the third-party vendor.

Automated third-party verification also provides centralized tag management within Campaign Manager and streamlines your workflow across all your digital campaigns. For example, placements that are wrapped through automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager will automatically sync to Display & Video 360 with their wrapped states intact, reducing time required to get campaigns live. Enabling third-party verification or adjusting the partner settings will not require the re-trafficking of tags.

This new feature also allows you to see a new metric in reporting called “Vendor Blocked Ads”. Now you don’t need to log into a separate system to see what ads were blocked. Instead you will have a centralized view alongside all of your media and creative performance.

We are launching with Integral Ad Science (IAS) as our first partner for this new capability and are actively working to bring other partners onboard.

Campaign Manager customers can now directly integrate with IAS using their automated tag to add IAS brand verification measurement to all of their creatives. Beta partners like HP have already seen benefits.

Custom pre-bid filtering in Display & Video 360

Marketers using Display & Video 360 also work with partners to enforce their media quality standards. Pre-bid filtering helps ensure they are only purchasing inventory that meets brand safety and suitability requirements. Our current integrations with third-parties support standard categories like alcohol, violence, and other broadly risky content.

In today’s environment, advertisers need more than just standard categories, so we are expanding this feature to support custom pre-bid filtering in Display & Video 360. This expanded capability allows brands to maximize reach while remaining contextually relevant and avoid content that is deemed unsuitable for their brand based on context, language, sentiment and emotion. For example, a CPG advertiser may not want to run ads featuring chocolate chip cookies on a healthy cooking site but may want to include that site for their protein bars media buy.

Agencies like the Kepler Group found success with custom pre-bid filtering.

 IAS is our first partner for this capability with others to follow.

Visit the help center to learn more about automated third-party verification in Campaign Manager and custom pre-bid filtering in Display & Video 360.