Bring more bids to the auction with Open Bidding

Invite multiple third-party exchanges to compete for your ad inventory in one, real-time first price auction with Open Bidding (formerly known as Exchange Bidding). This seamless, server-to-server technology helps you achieve a higher yield on ad inventory without sacrificing the user experience of your site or app, regardless of which advertising partners you use.

With Open Bidding, you can invite trusted third-party exchanges to compete together in real-time alongside Ad Exchange in Dynamic Allocation. Open Bidding also provides customized tools, unified reporting, simplified billing, and complete auction transparency.

Each Open Bidding interaction is handled by Ad Manager in a server-to-server integration that begins with an ad request.

1. An ad request is triggered

   Requests are sent to the Ad Manager server using Google Publisher Tags, the Google Mobile Ads SDK, or the IMA SDK. Support for native inventory is not yet available.

2. Ad Manager hosts a unified auction to determine the highest eligible bid

   Ad Manager requests bids from eligible Authorized Buyers, third-party exchanges, and/or mediation networks, through targeted yield groups, which return their highest bids to Ad Manager. These bids then compete with all of your reserved and non-reserved line items in a unified first price auction, and the highest bid wins.

3. The winning creative is returned to the publisher

   After a winner is selected, the ad server returns the winning asset or mediation list to the publisher for display.

In addition to maximizing yield, Open Bidding provides several benefits from its simplified implementation and operation.

• Dramatically minimized latency:

  With direct server-to-server connection to third-party exchanges and an extended auction time of 160ms (up from the Ad Exchange requirement of 100ms), Open Bidding reduces latency (when compared to header bidding implementations) for a more seamless user experience.

• Reduced operational complexity:

  Open Bidding eliminates the need to manage complex custom header bidding code and the numerous Ad Manager line-items associated with a header bidding implementation. Eligible inventory trafficked in Ad Manager can benefit from Open Bidding with no additional technical development required.

• Increased transparency and unified payments:

  Understand the exact revenue you’re  earning from each exchange with unified and accurate reporting. Get paid faster (net 30 days) and bill more accurately, without the 5-10% discrepancies common today — since serving, billing, and reporting are all on a single stack.

• Improved reporting and analytics:

  A unified reporting interface provides valuable advertiser and brand information, with improved query tool reports that cut across sales channels. The reports provide clarity on the value each partner brings and help you identify, report on, and analyze the advertisers and brands who bought impressions that were filled through Ad Exchange and Open Bidding.