Get comprehensive yield management with Google Ad Manager

Ad Manager provides you with a suite of yield management solutions that can help you overcome the challenges of monetizing inventory across all of your advertising partners to maximize your yield. Each of these unique solutions works in one of two ways:

1. Optimize who you sell inventory to across guaranteed reservations and programmatic demand in Ad Manager’s unified first price auction.
2. Maximize revenue in the unified first price auction through Google’s machine learning expertise.

You can choose to use some or all of the yield management solutions available in Ad Manager, and a part of our unified first price auction. Below we'll go into how the unified first price auction works in ad manager and then break down each of the individual yield management tools and their benefits.

Ad Manager helps you maximize your yield with a single, unified first price auction across all of your advertising demand. It compares the prices from your guaranteed campaigns with all non-guaranteed advertising sources — including real-time bidding partners, such as Authorized Buyers and Exchange Bidding partners — and prices from non-guaranteed line items, like those from your header bidding implementation, if you have one.

This all happens in a transparent and fair marketplace to help you manage your inventory as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Within Ad Manager there are three complementary solutions to help you find the highest paying partner for your impressions, across both guaranteed reservations and programmatic demand: Dynamic Allocation, First Look, and Optimized Competition. Dynamic Allocation is automatically enabled for all your Ad Manager networks. We recommend enabling both First Look and Optimized Competition to maximize your yield.

How Dynamic Allocation works

Dynamic Allocation is an automatic feature that increases competition for your inventory by allowing ad exchange to compete for your ad requests in real-time against Ad Manager line items, while guaranteeing that an ad will be delivered.

Here’s how it works:

1. After an ad request, Ad Manager selects the best guaranteed line item to serve the impression, and automatically calculates a temporary CPM based on priority and schedule. (In general, the further the line item is behind schedule, the higher the temporary CPM).
2. Ad Manager then runs an auction and returns the highest bid.
3. If the Ad Exchange bid is higher than the temporary CPM price, then Ad Exchange serves the ad of the auction winner. Otherwise, Ad Manager fills the impression with the guaranteed line item.

How First Look works

With First Look, you can unlock additional, high-value demand in Ad Exchange and capture incremental revenue opportunities through high-touch, granular controls.

Here’s how First Look allows you to allocate ads for maximum yield:

• Expose more inventory to high-value demand. Give preferred access to inventory for select Authorized Buyers so they can beat any reservation demand in Ad Manager. As a result, this can put reservation delivery at risk, so caution is advised.
• Increase yield through competition. Any bid eligible for First Look and above the First Look floor can compete against any demand in Ad Manager. First Look floors can bypass temporary CPMs created by Dynamic Allocation or Optimized Competition floors (if enabled).

How Optimized Competition works

Optimized Competition provides an automated, scalable way of capturing high-value programmatic demand across all of your backfill-eligible inventory. It does this by allowing Ad Manager remnant line items, Authorized Buyers, and Exchange Bidding buyers to compete against standard Ad Manager line items at a lower price floor.

Like Dynamic Allocation, it offers an easy, automated experience, and like First Look, it can help you achieve significant revenue gains with limited reservation delivery risk.

Here’s how it works:

1. When Ad Manager selects a standard line item, Optimized Competition can lower the temporary CPM created by Dynamic Allocation, to enable more competition. The new temporary CPM is algorithmically determined per query, based on the CPM of the competing standard line item and historical bids on similar queries, and it’s always at least as high as the CPM of the competing Ad Manager standard line item.
2. Ad Manager calls Ad Exchange and Exchange Bidding buyers. The Ad Exchange reserve price is greater than or equal to the Optimized Competition floor (for a standard line item).
3. If a bid from an Authorized Buyer, Exchange Bidding buyer, or non-guaranteed line item beats the reserve price, then they will win the auction. Otherwise, Ad Manager fills the impression with the guaranteed line item.

The Target CPM and Optimized Pricing features within Ad Manager can help you maximize revenue in the unified auction by leveraging Google’s machine learning expertise.

How Target CPM works

Target CPM helps you earn incremental revenue by adjusting floor prices to allow more advertisers to win auctions, while making sure that the average CPM you sell your inventory for is equal to or higher than a target price you specify.

When enabled, floor prices on individual queries can be either higher or lower than the target provided, but across multiple ads, the average CPM across your inventory will be higher than the target. Target CPM can be enabled on individual pricing rules.

How Optimized Pricing works

Optimized Pricing helps protect the long-term value of your inventory by using rich data to intelligently set price floors that more closely reflect the ad value. The process eliminates the difficulty and complexity of manually calculating price floors and uses historical data and automatic post-auction analysis to automatically update your price floors.