Google Vs. Header Bidding What Publishers Need to Know?

Google Vs. Header Bidding

Google’s unfair practices against its competitors are slowly coming into the light amidst antitrust lawsuits. Recent findings reveal that Google incentivized Facebook to fight against header bidding.

Header Bidding helped publishers in lowering Google’s interference in the inventory auction. It was so effective that by 2016, 70% of major publishers adopted header bidding. Facebook Ad Network was another emerging problem for Google’s monopoly in ad tech. In 2018, FAN distributed $1.5 billion to publishers. Google advertising executives listed “the need to fight off the existential threat posed by header bidding and FAN” as a priority for 2017.

Facebook was a supporter of header bidding till 2017. Google approached Facebook in September 2018, and by December, Facebook announced that it’ll adopt Open Bidding (Google’s alternative to Header Bidding). Both the parties signed a contract named Jedi Blue.

The Wall Street Journal listed the benefits that Facebook received with the Jedi Blue contract:

• Facebook pays Google a 5% to 10% transaction fee. (Google says this fee is standard.)
• Google helps Facebook recognize mobile and web users.
• Facebook bids to show ads to 90% of the users it recognizes.
• Facebook has 300-millisecond “timeout” to recognize users and bid. Some other participants have a shorter, 160-millisecond timeout.
• Facebook is locked into spending $500 million annually starting in the fourth year.”

Takeaway

If the allegations are true, then Google clearly tried to kill the competition by collaborating with Facebook. Such practices are unhealthy for Google’s competitors as well as for publishers. The governments around the world should keep an eye on the tech giants to prevent them.

Last Week’s Adtech Industry Highlights

The Antitrust Lawsuit Supports Publishers

Publishers have been complaining about Google’s monopoly for years. The antitrust probe against Google is giving a legal voice to these complaints. The Wall Street Journal reports that many publishers helped the states to build the case.

It is surprising for publishers that Google employees knew that Google doesn’t always help publishers making more money. The employees agreed that Google shouldn’t lie to publishers by wrongly positioning its ad products. One of the proofs suggests that a senior employee was even worried that the tools from Google generate suboptimal yields for publishers and, if exposed externally, Google can face negative media coverage.

During the time of Dynamic allocation, publishers complained that Google had advantages in the bidding process that allowed it to cherry-pick the inventory at favorable rates. After Google dropped dynamic allocation and brought exchanged bidding, many believe that Google’s ad server helps AdX win most of the bids. The suite will address all these issues.

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AMP Vs. Header Bidding

WordPress Tavern reports that the antitrust lawsuit alleges Google used AMP to push publishers away from header bidding and it didn’t allow Javascript to work well with AMP for the same reason. Google ad server employees and AMP employees created strategies to impede header bidding. AMP exploited publishers in many ways. As per the lawsuit :

• It allowed publishers to work only with a few partners.
• It helped Google to peek at bids from rival exchanges by routing their bids from Google’s server.
• AMP helped Google access the publishers’ user data because the users were loading the content from Google’s server.
• Internal documents reveal how AMP was an inferior product to the options previously available to the publishers.
• Google search favored AMP pages over the pages with header bidding.

Getting the Best out of Lazy Loading

Our VP of Ad Operations and Customer Success recently gave three considerations to get the best results out of lazy loading. Here are the takeaways from his post on AdExchanger:

• Implementing lazy loading can have a much more positive impact on eCPM in your targeted geographies when comparing with non-targeted geographies.
• Lazy loading increases viewability in non-targeted geographies to a greater extent as compared to targeted geographies.
• Implementing lazy loading when your current viewability is already above 80%, won’t have much impact on viewability or eCPM. Lazy loading will help more when the viewability is lower.

Originally published at https://headerbidding.co on January 4, 2021.