The tech giants Google support the efforts to increase transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem and they are also committed to make it easier for the marketers and boutique agency to monitor their digital campaigns and protect their brands. That is why they are introducing new ways for Digital & Video 360 to help the marketers avoid buying unauthorized web app and app ad inventory, moreover, Google also controls where there digital ads are appearing.
New settings to ads.txt
Since it was first envisaged in May 2017, Google, since then has supported and contributed to the IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt standard. It is a text file that lets its publishers openly declare who is authorized to sell their inventory programmatically. Ads.txt increases transparency throughout the advertising supply chain: marketers know they're buying inventory from the actual property owner, or an authorized re-seller and the legitimate publishers receive payments. Because of the ease and efficiency, over 93 percent of the web inventory available in Display & Video 360 is authorized by ads.txt files. In fact, ads.txt is one of the most rapidly adopted standards that the industry has ever seen.
Starting in August, Google will make ads.txt-only, the default setting for all new campaigns created in Display & Video 360 and running on web inventory. This ensures that by default the marketers only buy authorized inventory and is the next step in Google’s ongoing support of their standards.
Support for IAB Tech Lab’s app-ads.txt
Ads.txt was created to reduce fraud for the user’s campaigns running on the web by making it simpler to avoid transacting unauthorized inventory. To provide the users with the same level of protection against misrepresented app inventory, the IAB Tech Lab recently introduced their new app-ads.txt standard which supported apps running on mobile, connected TVs and other devices.
While it is still very early days for app-ads.txt adoption, Google is actively working to encourage app developers to publish app-ads.txt files. In the next few months, Display & Video 360 would probably stop buying unauthorized app inventory as identified by app-ads.txt files. When adoption of app-ads.txt reaches their adequate levels, then eventually Google would also allow marketers and agencies to choose to buy only those app inventories that are authorized.
More focus on brand protections
In addition to knowing that the users are buying inventories from authorized sellers, users also need to ensure that, their ads appear only in contexts that they define as suitable for their brand. Display and Video 360 offers them an inclusive set of controls to protect their brands, Google in recent times are getting feedbacks, that to apply the controls consistently to the campaigns is a very difficult task, especially if the users are managing a large number of campaigns.
To help solve this challenge, Google has introduced Brand Controls, another new resource available to all Display & Video 360 users that gives them a single view of the brand suitability settings, campaigns using ads.txt-only authorized sellers, and authentication services across all of their campaigns. With the Brand Controls dashboard, users could more easily see how their campaigns are using different controls together with content labels, sensitive categories, and keyword exclusions.
Now the users could manage and make changes to all of these settings across all the campaigns in their Display & Video 360 account at once, which includes display, video, apps and TrueView.
With Brand Controls users could also get a report that shows them what percentage of traffic was filtered before a bid was placed using Google’s built-in fraud detection and brand suitability protection. This way, users would get full transparency on how Display & Video 360 is protecting their media buys.
Lastly, the Brand Controls dashboard makes it easy to track any edits that are made to the users brand suitability, authorized sellers, and verification settings. This helps Google to ensure that their media team follows the guidelines that they have setup to protect the campaigns of their users.
By making ads.txt-only the default setting for new campaigns, supporting the new app-ads.txt standard, and creating the new Brand Controls center, Google is making Display & Video 360 a more effective solution to help the users protect their budget and brand as well.