Google changing Ad Manager after French authority investigation
After a long investigation by French Competition Authority, Google is making changes to the Ad Manager. The authority fined Google Euro 220 million for abusing its advertising power. It said Google has been promoting its own online advertising services to the detriment of rivals with Ad Manager favouring the company’s own ad marketplace, Google AdX.
Google’s French legal director, Maria Gomri, in a blog says “we have agreed on a set of commitments to make it easier for publishers to make use of data and use our tools with other ad technologies. We will be testing and developing these changes over the coming months before rolling them out more broadly, including some globally.”
The agreement with the authority means that Google must give publishers at least three months notice for changes that are major, requiring significant implementation effort that publishers must adopt.
“Over the past two years, we have been working with the French Competition Authority (FCA) to answer their questions about our advertising technology, and more specifically about Google Ad Manager, our publisher platform,” Gomri writes.
The company has agreed to create a solution that ensures all buyers that a publisher works with, including those who participate in Header Bidding, can receive equal access to data related to outcomes from the Ad Manager auction.
“In particular, we will be providing information around the ‘minimum bid to win’ from previous auctions.”
Google says it will further increase the flexibility of Google Ad Manager “to meet the evolving needs of our partners, including allowing them to set custom pricing rules for ads that are in sensitive categories and implementing product changes that improve interoperability between Ad Manager and third-party ad servers.”
“Also, we are reaffirming that we will not limit Ad Manager publishers from negotiating specific terms or pricing directly with other sell-side platforms (SSPs). And we will continue to provide Ad Manager publishers with controls to include or exclude certain buyers at their discretion,” Google says.
“As part of these commitments, we are reaffirming our promise not to use data from other SSPs to optimize bids in our exchange in a way that other SSPs can’t reproduce. We are also reaffirming our promise not to share any bid from any Ad Manager auction participants with any other auction participant prior to completion of the auction. Additionally, we’ll give publishers at least three months’ notice for major changes requiring significant implementation effort that publishers must adopt, unless those are related to security or privacy protections, or are required by law.”
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