Google launches a beta for unified pricing rules on Ad Manager

Google this month launched a beta on Google Ad Manager for unified pricing rules. Unified Pricing Rules allow publishers to prepare for the transition to the unified first price auction. Unified pricing rules enable publishers to manage the pricing of the inventory across all indirect sources of demand from a single place in Google Ad Manager.

The indirect sources are the bids submitted by Google Authorized Buyers, Exchange Bidding buyers and by other demand partners buying through non-guaranteed line items that will all compete in a single-stage auction, with consistent rules and pricing across all channels.

Publishers can set up pricing rules for:

• Open Auction via Authorized Buyers (formerly known as Ad Exchange)
• Private Auctions (both optimized and non-optimized)
• First Look demand
• Third-party exchanges that participate in Exchange Bidding
• Non-guaranteed line item types Price Priority, Network and Bulk (Beta)

Unified pricing rules can only be used on Ad Exchange mapped accounts in Google Ad Manager. Publishers can apply up to 100 unified pricing rules per Ad Manager network.

The rule with the higher floor price always applies when rules are overlapping. Rules don't apply to Programmatic Direct campaigns. Advertiser-specific floor prices are available.

The new product changes on Ad Manager are not making all publishers happy, according to Ad Exchanger. Publishers see limitations ahead on the unified auctions. An example is that is not possible to set rules at a platform level, and the limit of 100 rules restrain publishers used to have hundreds of rules.