Google has reintroduced the ability for publishers to set different ad pricing on its products for the first time in more than six years.
Publishers used to be able to choose to set higher price floors on Google than they did for non-Google programmatic advertising.
Many publishers set higher minimum prices for Google’s demand to avoid practices like Google using the advantageous data it had from across its tools to bid marginally higher than any non-Google bid.
But in April 2019 Google introduced unified pricing, meaning publishers had to sell to Google and its competitors for the same price.
This resulted in publishers often seeing lower yield than they might have done previously.
Google said it would end these unified pricing rules in response to antitrust action in both the US and Europe.
It proposed ending the unified pricing rules in its suggested remedies after being found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour in adtech in the US this year.
It proposed that it would “not require publishers setting floor prices within Google Ad Manager for qualifying open web display inventory to do so on a uniform basis across multiple buying tools or ad exchanges”.
The European Commission fined Google €2.95bn (£2.59bn) in September for distorting competition by “favouring its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers”.
The European Commission ordered Google to bring its “self-preferencing practices to an end” and “implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain”. Google was told to set out how it planned to do this within 60 days and has done so, including end to unified pricing rules.
Google hopes its proposed behavioural changes will help it avoid being forced to divest parts of its adtech business, a measure backed by both the US Department of Justice and European Commission.
Google said its proposed remedies “would make it even easier for publishers and advertisers to use other ad tech providers – all while minimising disruption for our customers”.
It promised “near term product changes to end the specific practices the Commission criticized including: We will deprecate unified pricing rules for display, video and app ads, giving publishers the option to set different price floors (minimum price) for different bidders when using Google Ad Manager.”
This change has now come into effect.
Google published a blog on Monday about new Ad Manager features which set out the new ability to set different rules for different bidders.
“Publishers now have the ability to set floor prices for specific programmatic bidders in pricing rules,” it said.
“For example, you can create a rule that requires Bidder A to bid at least $5, while allowing all other bidders to compete at a $2 floor.
“With this launch, we have renamed ‘unified pricing rules’ to ‘pricing rules’.”
Jason Kint, chief executive of US publisher group Digital Content Next, alerted board members to the changes and suggested in an email, seen by Press Gazette, that they were “likely an effort to demonstrate responsiveness and avoid stronger remedies” by Google.
Kint said unified pricing rules “forced publishers to use one universal floor across all exchanges, preventing competitive pricing and often lowering publisher yield according to Court findings”.
Kint also said the group has been asked by the European Commission to review Google’s list of proposed remedy changes, which “may impact significant portions of digital ad revenue, including video”.
But he noted that the unified pricing changes are “the only change that gives most DCN publishers immediate, tangible relief in Google’s EU compliance package”.
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