Four Reasons You Should Consider Making Display & Video 360 Your DSP

A Demand-Side Platform (DSP) simplifies the process for direct marketers and agencies by enabling them to purchase digital advertising inventory across various ad exchanges and Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs). These platforms are designed to ease your workload.

However, the abundance of DSPs can make choosing the right one difficult. Many of our clients turn to Google's Display & Video 360 (DV360), a leading choice within the Google Marketing Platform (GMP).

DV360 stands out due to its comprehensive integration options, diverse audience targeting, varied inventory sources and creative formats, and advanced AI and machine learning capabilities. These features and its included durable solutions make it a preferred option for many marketers, especially with third-party cookie deprecation on the horizon.

Here is a quick look at four areas that make DV360 stand out.

Integration with other GMP products

One major advantage of utilizing DV360 as your DSP is its integration with other GMP products. You can link Google’s Ad Server, Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), to DV360 to seamlessly port creatives, floodlights and audience lists to DV360 for centralized and robust reporting.

You can also link Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to DV360, which not only allows you to use GA4 audience lists for targeting, but lets you auto-bid on GA4 goals or conversions through custom bidding. 

Another benefit? Within DV360, you also have the ability to link your Google Tag Manager (GTM) containers with your advertiser, allowing you to seamlessly push your floodlight tags to GTM and then configure your tag firing rules.

Expanded Reach With DV360's Audience Options 

DV360 gives you access to a wide range of audiences, including:  

First-party audiences

First-party audiences have always been valuable, but as cookie deprecation quickly approaches this is especially true. There are various ways to activate your first-party data. You can re-engage users by creating tag-based audiences based on your Floodlight activity data or YouTube channel. If you have linked your GA4 property and Google Ads account, you can target those audiences that have ported in DV360. Lastly, you can leverage Customer Match or LiveRamp for CRM uploads.

Third-party audiences

Third-party audiences allow users to target audiences through third-party data vendors that cannot be leveraged through first-party data. Just be aware that these audiences do have a CPM uplift whether you are targeting towards or against them.

Google Affinity and In-Market Audiences

Affinity audiences help reach users based on their specific interests as they browse pages across the web. These audiences are useful when you are looking to raise awareness among affinity groups that have a strong interest in your product. In-market audiences help raise awareness among people who are in the market to purchase a particular good/service. These will allow you to find customers who are researching products and actively considering buying something similar to what you offer as they are browsing across the web.

Combined audiences

Combined audiences allow you to create an audience that combines various audience attributes (first-party, affinity, in-market, detailed demo, life events, and third-party). This allows you to create a persona that represents your target audience.

Custom lists (Custom affinity and Custom intent)

You can create two types of custom lists: custom affinity and custom intent. Custom Affinity lists allow you to target an audience by the media they consume online or by the products/services they’re interested in. Custom Intent lists allow you to define and reach specific audiences identified as being in the intent stage, where they’re about to make a purchase decision related to a service or product.

***Privacy and Compliance in Audience Management***

DV360 features involving advertiser-uploaded data, like third-party audiences and custom lists, require Google's review to comply with data privacy policies. Access to these features may not be immediate for all accounts. For detailed information on eligibility and how to apply, visit the official Google help center article.

Robust Inventory Sources and Creative Formats

DV360 has a robust network of supported exchanges that you can bid on or exclude from your targeting. Along with the public inventory that is accessible through DV360, you also have the ability to create and target private deals and inventory packages through the Marketplace. And best of all you have access to the most exclusive inventory, such as YouTube TV.

In addition to the robust inventory access, you have a wide variety of responsive creative formats for your Display, Video, Audio, Native, YouTube, Over-the-Top (OTT) and Connected TV (CTV) buys.

CTV has become increasingly popular and shows no sign of slowing down. It offers increased reach, more effective targeting, flexibility and holistic measurement and reporting. Plus, it’s privacy-safe, relying on first-party data and proprietary IDs instead of cookies. If you would like more information, download our CTV ebook here.

Advanced AI and Machine Learning

AI plays a significant role in the current tech landscape. The GMP has always had AI and Machine Learning built into it for maximum efficiency in automation and optimization. DV360 uses Google AI for: 

• Enhanced automation helps improve campaign performance by using Google’s AI technology to learn from click, conversion, and impression signals to predict the optimal bid for each impression. Keep in mind that enhanced automation takes time to train, so allow 2-4 weeks before assessing performance results.

Enhanced automation can be used to: 

• • Optimize campaign performance by accessing advanced optimization models to help make optimal bids 
  • Fill signal gaps when third-party cookie signals aren’t available
    
    
• Optimized targeting is a powerful tool for engaging with new audiences that are likely to convert. Optimized targeting reaches audiences beyond your manually targeted audience segments. You can learn more about optimized targeting best practices here.
  
  
• Custom Bidding to help you reach your campaign goals by optimizing towards the outcomes you value. The custom bidding algorithm will go through a training phase and uses machine learning to learn from your historical data so it can better score and prioritize your bids on the right impressions for your campaign.

Interested in learning more about DV360 and its capabilities? Please contact us for more information.