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Programmatic Guaranteed deals provide an automated buying solution with tagless trafficking, advanced targeting, and consolidated reporting and billing.
Programmatic Guaranteed deals allow you to execute direct buys with publishers while eliminating manual processes, such as exchanging tags, troubleshooting discrepancies, and handling multiple invoices. In addition, the use of audience targeting helps narrow who your ad is shown to. With a more automated approach to transacting, Programmatic Guaranteed helps you focus on the top priorities for your business.
Note that Marketplace must be activated for your account. Contact your account manager for more information.
Negotiation overview
Negotiation begins when the publisher sends a proposal to you. You can also send a request for proposal (RFP) to the publisher to begin the negotiation process.
Proposals contain campaign details, including inventory and a proposed price. The proposal is shared between you and the publisher and is sent back and forth until both parties agree.
Programmatic Guaranteed request for proposal (RFP)
A request for proposal (RFP) is a document sent from media planners like you to inventory providers that request media (inventory) to purchase for advertising purposes. Many inventory providers, or publishers, only provide inventory to buyers after being contacted with an RFP.
You can use Display & Video 360 to initiate an RFP with your publisher. Once the RFP is sent, the publisher will receive an email notification and review it. You can send RFPs from either the Marketplace or Negotiations menus.
Sending an RFP from the Marketplace
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Navigate to Inventory > Marketplace and choose an inventory type.
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To show Programmatic Guaranteed eligible publishers, from the Filter Inventory pane on the right, select Commitment > Guaranteed.
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Select a publisher to whom you would like to send an RFP. The publisher pane appears on the right.
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Click Request proposal.
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Fill out the form with your desired specifications. Remember to select Guaranteed as the Inventory type.
When adding audience targeting to your RFP, coordinate with your publisher to ensure that there are no conflicts between audience targeting and proposal line item targeting. -
Click Send
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Once sent, the publisher will receive an email notification and review the RFP. The RFP will appear in Negotiations (look for the status “Action required”) for additional changes and further negotiation or acceptance once the publisher has responded.
Sending an RFP from the Negotiations menu
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Navigate to Inventory > Negotiations.
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Click New
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Fill out the form with your desired specifications. Remember to select Guaranteed as the Inventory type. When adding audience targeting to your RFP, coordinate with your publisher to ensure that there are no conflicts between audience targeting and proposal line item targeting.
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Click the Send button.
Once sent, the publisher will receive an email notification to review the RFP. The publisher will review your request and respond with a proposal.
After the publisher responds with a proposal, you can view it by going to Inventory > Negotiation (look for the status “Action required”) for additional changes and further negotiation or acceptance.
If you’d like to make changes to the proposal, click Edit proposal.
The following fields are negotiable:
- Allow pausing
- Rate
- Daypart (specify the days and times you want to serve ads)
- Units (Impressions)
- Start and end dates
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Audience list
- Demographics
Add a message to the publisher and make your changes. Click Send for review to send your changes back to the publisher to review. If both you and the publisher agree to the changes, they will send a request for acceptance to close the deal. Once you click Accept, the proposal is finalized.
If you’d like to make changes after the proposal has been finalized, click Renegotiate and make your changes. When you are done, add a message to the publisher and click Send for review.
When renegotiating an RFP:
A warning that The order is in renegotiation appears in My inventory. You can accept new terms in Negotiations, then select update creative in My inventory
Contracted quantity and Programmatic Guaranteed deals
Publishers control pacing for Programmatic Guaranteed deals. Pacing is the rate at which your budget is spent, measured in dollars spent or impressions purchased.
While Programmatic Guaranteed deals aim to stop serving once you reach the quantity of impressions or end date in your contract, line items may exceed the quantity of impressions it delivers by a small amount. This could occur when there's a delay in impression counting or if the line item sends a simultaneous request as you reach the cap.
In this case, only the contracted amount of impressions will be on the buyer invoice. You may pull a report to view the amount of delivered impressions as needed.
Configuring Programmatic Guaranteed deals
Once you and the publisher have reached an agreement on the proposal, it’s time for you to configure the deal. (Note that this should be done at the partner level.)
Here you will:
- Select advertisers, a default advertiser, and a campaign
- Assign creatives
- Assign a Floodlight activity
- Set a margin
- Adjust the partner revenue model
- Adjust the partner costs
Once this step is complete, the Programmatic Guaranteed insertion order is automatically set up in the selected Display & Video 360 advertisers.
To configure your deal, select Inventory > My Inventory from the left menu. Locate the deal in the Action Required section and select Action > Configure on the right.
It's possible to secure inventory, such as fixed volume at a fixed price, in advance – even months ahead of time – even if your creative is not ready. To do this, accept the deal in Negotiations. You can configure your deal later when you have the creative. You should do this at least 1–2 days before launch date in case of potential issues.
To edit the deal’s advertiser, click on a deal in My Inventory. If you change the default advertiser, you'll need to choose a new set of creatives and a revenue model for the new advertiser. Inventory will stop serving (in up to 1 hour) for the advertisers you remove. You can only edit a deal if you have access to all of the advertisers attached to it.
This is where you review the basic details, choose advertisers, and select a campaign.
- Review the Deal details section and make any necessary changes to the order and product names.
- Review and make any necessary changes to the partner revenue model and partner costs.
- Select whether only partner users or both partner and default advertiser users can edit and configure this deal.
Next, choose which advertisers have permission to target the products. Optionally, you can toggle Assign inventory source to all advertisers to allow any advertiser permission to target the products. When you are done, choose the default advertiser. This advertiser will use the guaranteed inventory unless specified otherwise. - Select a campaign. Note that only a campaign under the default advertiser can be selected.
Step 2: Choose creatives
Step 3: Settings (Optional)
Display & Video 360 uses Floodlight activities to track conversions and add users to remarketing lists. Select the Floodlight activity that you'll use for conversion tracking in this line item. You can create and manage Floodlight activities by going to Floodlight > Floodlight Activities in your advertiser. Learn more about Floodlight activities.
Note that if you use Campaign Manager 360, Floodlight activities are managed in your Floodlight settings and synced through your linked Display & Video 360 advertiser.
Next, specify the partner revenue model along with any partner costs.
Click Done when you are finished. Your deal will appear on the My Inventory page, ready for you to configure.
Programmatic Guaranteed deals with publishers on
Google Ad Manager
Consider the following when negotiating and configuring Programmatic Guaranteed deals with publishers on Google Ad Manager:
Creative formats
Review the creative formats that are currently supported. In addition, you can also consider using custom creatives, which allow for high-impact ad formats in Programmatic Guaranteed deals. If your creative is rejected, learn how to troubleshoot your rejected creative.
Using audience lists and demographics
During the negotiation phase, buyers can target or exclude the following for each reservation deal for a Programmatic Guaranteed order:
- first- or third-party audiences
- Google Affinity
- Google In-Market audience lists
The publisher's forecasting tool calculates the available inventory that matches the audience list the buyer selects:
- The "OR" logic applies within the set of lists the buyer chooses to include or exclude.
- The "AND" logic applies between sets of included and excluded lists.
- Navigate to the Advertisers level.
- Choose your advertiser.
- Expand Audiences > All Audiences in the left menu to see the size of an audience list.
Buyer audience lists are built into Ad Manager forecasting, allowing publishers to run forecasts on Programmatic Guaranteed proposals that include buyer-targeted first- or third-party audience lists. Ad Manager has access to buyer audience lists during both forecasting and serving, so there is no latency when changes are made to the audience list. During forecasting, Ad Manager takes historical data and existing overlapping reservations into account for the remainder of the campaign.
Limitations
- Not supported for YouTube cross-sell deals.
Sponsorships
A sponsorship is a type of ad campaign in which the advertiser purchases exclusive access to inventory specific to the app or website for a period of time. This is sometimes called “share-of-voice”(SOV) because you get a certain share of page views on the publisher’s site.
Sponsorships are generally time-based ads that can be sold based on cost per day (CPD) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). All targeting criteria are available for sponsorship line items. If targeting criteria are selected, the percentage basis becomes the percentage of matching impressions.
Sponsorships are negotiated and configured the same way you would a traditional Programmatic Guaranteed deal. The Share of Voice column shows the ad serving goal in percentage of total impressions.
Cost per day (CPD) budgets and sponsorships
Deals with CPD budgets have a minimum number of impressions that must be purchased by the buyer and served by the publisher each day. You will only be charged when the number of impressions exceeds the amount agreed upon by you and publisher. This is important to reiterate with the publisher when setting the minimum number of impressions.
No revenue is displayed in reporting, even if impressions show a value above zero. When you do purchase the minimum daily amount, you'll be charged the CPD daily rate, even if the total number of impressions purchased and delivered is more than the minimum. Reporting shows revenue for days when the minimum impression value was purchased.
CPD sponsorships do not guarantee that buyer’s ads will be the only ads that appear during the time period. In outlier cases where Ad Manager is unable to serve the buyer’s ad creative (for example, an ad creative is not supported by the user's browser), Ad Manager ensures your impression is fully monetized by serving a contending ad instead. While this occurrence is the exception, CPD sponsorships should not be sold as a 100% share-of-voice guarantee.
Cost per mille (CPM) sponsorships
CPM sponsorships are similar to CPD sponsorships, except:
- CPD sponsorship buyers are aware of the minimum amount of impressions that must serve before they are charged the daily rate.
- CPM sponsorship buyers only know the maximum number of impressions they agree to buy, along with the rate they are willing to pay per 1000 impressions. (Note that the deal will stop serving once the maximum number of impressions has been met.) The total cost will be the rate multiplied by the number of impressions that end up serving by the end of the campaign (up to the negotiated maximum).
Limitations
- The budget summary on the Negotiations page excludes any other sponsorship products from the same order.
- The total impression summary on the deal details section of the Basic details page excludes any other sponsorship products from the same order.
Renegotiating Programmatic Guaranteed deals with exchanges
Programmatic Guaranteed deals with exchanges (PGX) offer flexibility for adjustments after they're finalized. Exchanges can initiate a renegotiation for key aspects of your deal, hence, simplifying the process of incorporating changes without starting from scratch.
The existing manual renegotiation processes remain available. The renegotiation feature is made available for PG deals through the seller api and is initiated by the seller of the inventory.
Here's how renegotiation works and what you need to know:
Key concepts
| Concept | Definition |
| Renegotiation | Renegotiation occurs after a PGX deal has been approved and the exchange, for example, seller initiates changes to the deal terms in Display & Video 360. |
| Deal Phases | The renegotiation process varies depending on the current phase of the deal. |
| Pre-flight | The deal's start date is in the future. |
| In-flight | The deal has started but has not yet reached its end date. |
| Post-flight | The deal has ended. |
Supported renegotiation changes
The following table outlines the allowed changes for each deal phase.
| Deal phase | Flight start date | Flight end date | CPM | Impression target | Creative requirements |
| Pre-flight (≥24h) | Increase, Conditional Decrease* | Increase, Decrease | Increase, Decrease | Increase, Decrease | No changes allowed |
| Pre-flight (<24h) | No changes allowed | Increase, No Decrease | Increase, No Decrease | Conditional Increase**, No Decrease | No changes allowed |
| In-flight | No changes allowed | Conditional Increase***, No Decrease | Increase, No Decrease | Conditional Increase**, No Decrease | No changes allowed |
| Post-flight | No changes allowed | No changes allowed | No changes allowed | No changes allowed | No changes allowed |
- * Conditional Decrease: Allowed if the new flight start date is at least 24 hours in the future.
- **Conditional Increase: Not allowed if the change occurs within the billing window, that is, 12 PM PST on the last day of the month to 12 PM PST on the first day of the following month.
- ***Conditional Increase: Allowed if the original end date is at least 24 hours in the future.
Unsupported renegotiation changes
The following deal aspects cannot be renegotiated:
- Formats
- Rate type
- Creative requirements
How renegotiation works
- Exchange initiates changes: The exchange sends a renegotiation request to Display & Video 360 with the proposed changes to the deal terms.
- Review changes: You receive a notification in Display & Video 360 about the renegotiation request. You can review the proposed changes and communicate with the exchange, if needed.
- Accept or decline: You can choose to accept or decline the proposed changes. If accepted, the PGX deal will be updated accordingly.
Important considerations
- Time sensitivity: Be aware of time constraints, especially for deals approaching their start or end dates. Delays in accepting renegotiations could impact deal delivery.
- Billing: Changes to deal terms, particularly impressions and CPM, can affect billing. Review the renegotiated terms carefully.
- Communication: Maintain clear communication with the exchange throughout the renegotiation process to avoid any misunderstandings.
Programmatic Guaranteed deals with third-party exchanges
In addition to setting up Programmatic Guaranteed deals with publishers on Google Ad Manager, you can also set up Programmatic Guaranteed deals with third-party exchanges. This increases the amount of reservation inventory available for Programmatic Guaranteed deals while leveraging tagless transactions and Google-managed billing features.
Available third-party exchanges for Programmatic Guaranteed deals:
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Display and Video
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Audio
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*Supports Frequency Management on Programmatic Guaranteed
You can initiate a negotiation with your publisher by sending a request for proposal (RFP). See Programmatic Guaranteed request for proposals (RFP) for details. If you and the publisher have already negotiated the terms of the deal offline and you have the deal ID, you can create the deal in My Inventory.
Step 1: Add products and advertisers
This is where you add one or more products (publisher placements) and choose your advertisers. Select a partner revenue model, enter the partner costs, and choose which advertisers have permission to target the products.
- Sign in to your Display & Video 360 account.
- Navigate to Inventory > My Inventory.
- Click New > New guaranteed inventory.
- Enter a name for the insertion order that you are creating, along with the publisher’s name.
- Choose Programmatic as the Transaction Method as well as the exchange that you are working with for the deals being created.
- Add your products by entering them into the table, with each row containing an individual Deal ID provided by the Publisher/Exchange.
- Select a partner revenue model and enter an appropriate percentage. Learn more about the different partner revenue models available.
- Enter the partner costs. Learn more about partner costs.
- Choose which advertisers have permission to target the products. Optionally, you can toggle Assign inventory source to all advertisers to allow any advertiser permission to target the products. If multiple advertisers are selected, choose one to be the Default advertiser.
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Select an existing campaign within the default advertiser from Step 9 to contain your default insertion orders and line items.
Step 2: Choose creatives
The next step is to select at least one available creative for each of the product sizes and durations. When you’ve selected one or more creatives for each size, click Next.
Step 3: Settings (Optional)
Display & Video 360 uses Floodlight activities to track conversions and add users to remarketing lists. Select the Floodlight activity that you'll use for conversion tracking in this line item. You can create and manage Floodlight activities by going to Floodlight > Floodlight Activities in your advertiser. Learn more about Floodlight activities.
Note that if you use Campaign Manager 360, Floodlight activities are managed in your Floodlight settings and synced through your linked Display & Video 360 advertiser.
Additionally, you can specify the partner revenue model along with any partner costs.
When you've made all your choices, click Done. Your deal now appears on the My Inventory page under “Everything else”.
Configure or edit inventory by hovering over the inventory source and clicking the button to the far right. Note that you must configure the deal before it can go live.
YouTube Programmatic Guaranteed deals
Learn more about the requirements and setup for YouTube Programmatic Guaranteed deals.