The demand for greater transparency and coordinated efforts to eliminate fraud in the digital advertising supply chain has become a rallying cry across the industry. Last week, Google announced several measures it is taking to address concerns of media buyers using its demand-side platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM).
The initiatives break down into three buckets:
More information about filtered invalid traffic
Advertisers will get more detail about the prebid and post-serve impressions that DoubleClick Bid Manager detected and filtered out. Invalid traffic details include the total number of filtered bids broken down by type, such as sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) and traffic from data centers, crawlers and abnormal activity.
Additionally, supply partners will also get reports on the invalid traffic from their platform that DBM is filtering out so that they can take action.
Automated refunds for invalid traffic from supply sources
Google has been working with supply partners to implement more automated refund processes from invalid traffic. AppNexus, Index Exchange, OpenX, Teads, Telaria and DoubleClick Ad Exchange are among those that have committed to provide advertiser refunds on traffic that is identified as invalid for up to 30 days after a monthly billing period.
Google says current commitments cover 90 percent of inventory available through DBM. Advertisers will soon be able to narrow their media buys through DBM to only transact with sources that have agreed to automated refunds for invalid traffic.
Fast-tracking ads.txt adoption
Ads.txt is a solution from the IAB Tech Lab designed to weed out counterfeit inventory by helping buyers easily detect which sellers are approved to sell publisher inventory by crawling a file placed on publisher domains. Google has been an active proponent of ads.txt and pushing for faster, widespread adoption by publishers. Advertisers are also getting louder in their demands for publishers to add ads.txt files to their sites in Q4 of this year.
By the end of October, DoubleClick Bid Manager will only buy inventory from sources identified as authorized sellers in a publisher’s ads.txt file when a file is available. Presumably, at some point, ads.txt will be a requirement for DBM.
Spokespeople for media buying giant GroupM and Nissan Motor Corporation expressed support of Google’s efforts to improve transparency and drive out fraud in the blog post by Pavam Shodjai, Google director of product management.
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