Unified pricing rules

Manage auction floor prices across non-guaranteed demand.#unifiedpricingrules #targetcpm

You can centralize management of auction floor prices across your non-guaranteed demand with unified pricing rules. Find unified pricing rules by navigating to Inventory, then Pricing rules. This article includes the following sections:

• How unified pricing rules work
• Create unified pricing rules
• Manage and troubleshoot unified pricing rules
• Report on unified pricing rules

In this article, "price" or "pricing" refers to either target CPM or floor prices.

Unified pricing rules best practices

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Unified pricing rules best practices

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How unified pricing rules work

Where unified pricing rules apply

Prices in unified pricing rules apply in the following contexts:

• The Open Auction via Authorized Buyers 
• Private Auctions (with or without Open Auction optimization enabled)
• First Look demand
• Third-party exchanges that participate in Open Bidding
• Remnant line item types Price Priority, Network and Bulk
• Ad Exchange linked accounts (Unified pricing rules are set in the mapped Ad Exchange account)
• AdSense backfill (Unified pricing rules are set in the Ad Manager network making the backfill request)

Pricing does not apply to campaigns negotiated via Programmatic Direct.

Unified pricing rules also include Header bidding trafficking, which allows publishers to integrate their header bidding demand into Ad Manager.

How unified pricing rules are applied

• If two unified pricing rules target overlapping inventory, the rule with the higher price applies.
• If a First Look pricing rule and a unified pricing rule target overlapping inventory, the rule with the higher price applies for Ad Exchange demand.

Pricing for everything

By default, a pricing rule applies to everyone and all creative types and sizes (with the Set pricing for everything option). However, you can optionally specify pricing for individual advertisers, brands, sizes, and more (with the Set pricing for specific items option). When you do so, there's a remaining optional setting to specify Pricing for everything.

The price under Set Pricing for everything applies to any advertisers, brands, sizes, and so forth, for which you set different prices. Within a rule, the price setting with the higher price applies.

For example, suppose you set the specific floor price of $3.00 for the travel advertiser YourAdventure and for the size 728x90. In the same rule, under Set pricing for everything, you set a a floor price of $4.00. Since the floor price under Pricing for everything is higher ($4.00), it will apply to the travel advertiser YourAdventure and to the size 728x90.

Good practice suggests setting the price under Set pricing for everything to a value lower than those included for individual advertisers, brands, sizes, and so forth, or to leave the Set Pricing for everything option turned off.

How floor prices are shared with buyers

To help buyers bid more effectively on your inventory, Ad Manager shares a floor price in bid requests. This floor price represents a value below which Ad Manager can guarantee a buyer's bid will be filtered.

Therefore, floor prices for specific items—such as advertisers, brands, and sizes—are not included in the floor price sent to buyers, because we:

• Don't know the specific creative the buyer is going to bid with
• Cannot guarantee that the floor price for that specific item will apply to them 

Separate floor prices for skippable and non-skippable video are not sent to buyers.

For a multi-size request, the floor price sent to a buyer will be the lowest floor price for any eligible size. 

Note that the floor price for the specific item will still apply in the auction if the buyer's creative matches the targeting, even if it isn't shared in the bid request.

Remnant line item types and prices

Price Priority, Network and Bulk line items can compete in the auction. Unified pricing rules affect line item types Price Priority, Network and Bulk. Line items of this type must have a CPM that meets or exceeds the price set in unified pricing rules to compete in the auction.

Unified pricing rules do not apply to:

• House line items 
• Line items with a zero (0) rate and no Value CPM set
• Line items with a CPD or CPA rate, which are treated as if they have a $0 rate
• Pricing rules may not apply to CPC line items on all requests. See CPC line item delivery for more information.

House line items and the auction

Floor prices and target CPM do not apply to House line items and line items with a $0 Value CPM.

House line items only serve when no remnant line items (Network, Bulk, Price Priority), Ad Exchange or Open Bidding demand are available to serve. That is, House line items are treated as if they have a $0 rate and do not compete on price via dynamic allocation.

House line item CPM determines the ranking of eligible House ads. However, House ads don't need to meet the floor price or target CPM set in unified pricing rules to be eligible to serve, so they effectively act as fall-back ads.

Blocking

Unified pricing rules don't provide blocking functionality. Blocks can be managed through Protections. Blocks aren't supported for Open Bidding traffic.

Pricing for different sizes

Multi-size pricing is available in unified pricing rules. When multi-size pricing is set, an optional setting that specifies Pricing for everything is enabled by default. This option applies to all sizes, not just those for which you have not set pricing. Learn more about pricing for everything.

Pricing for different sensitive categories

You can set pricing rules that apply only to creatives in selected sensitive categories. Some ads are considered “sensitive” due to the nature of the business or ad—such as Sensationalism or Significant Skin Exposure. Our system classifies ads automatically, and we don't rely on advertiser-provided categorization.

These rules don't apply to remnant line items.

To add pricing rules for different sensitive categories:

1. In step 5 of the procedures below, select Set pricing for specific items.
2. Click  next to "Sensitive categories," select the desired categories, and click Done.

Pricing for different creative types

You can set pricing rules that apply to only display or video (in-stream and out-stream) creatives. Note that the floor prices and/or target CPMs still apply across all inventory formats (including rewarded, banner, in-stream, native, interstitial, and app open). The demand's creative type determines which floor/target CPM is applied.

If Ad Manager can't determine the creative type (for example, in header bidding), the floor/target CPM for the "Display" creative type is applied.

To add pricing rules for display or video creatives:

1. In step 5 of the procedures below, select Set pricing for specific items.
2. Click  next to "Creative types," select Video or Display, and click Done.

Pricing for different video options

You can set floor pricing or target CPMs that apply to only video creatives.

To add pricing rules for video creatives:

1. In step 5 of the procedures below, select Set pricing for specific items.
2. Click next to "Video options," and choose from the following:
   1. Video minimum duration: Set a minimum video duration for the pricing rule to apply, or leave blank for the rule to not limit based on duration.
   2. Video skippability: Choose for the pricing rule to apply to only skippable video ads, only non-skippable video ads, or to simply not limit pricing based on skippability.

Programmatic Direct

Unified pricing rules don't apply to Programmatic Direct campaigns. This includes Programmatic Guaranteed (Standard and Sponsorship) and Preferred Deal line items created under Programmatic Direct.

Pricing for advertisers, buyers, and bidders

Advertiser- and brand-specific pricing can be configured in unified pricing rules. They don't apply to remnant line items. Per-buyer and per-bidder pricing are not available.

How Open Bidding buyers get pricing information in the bid request

• The price floor continues to be located in the bidfloor field for OpenRTB.
• For the Ad Exchange proto, it is the minimum_cpm_micros field.

In RTB Breakout, bids below the floor continue to be shown as "Bid was below the minimum threshold."

Learn more in the Authorized Buyers developer documentation article Authorized Buyers Real-Time Bidding Proto.

Create unified pricing rules

You can apply up to 200 unified pricing rules per Ad Manager network.

1. Navigate to Inventory, then Pricing rules.
2. Click New unified pricing rule.
3. Enter a name for the pricing rule.
4. Next to "Targeting," select the inventory to which you want this rule to apply.
5. Next to "Pricing," set pricing options.
   1. By default, a pricing rule applies to everyone and all sizes and creative types (with the Set pricing for everything option). You can optionally select Set pricing for specific items and enter a unique floor price or target CPM for the items you specify.

      When you select Set pricing for specific items, the Pricing for everything checkbox appears as an additional option below. You can select the checkbox and set a floor price or target CPM for this option. If turned on, the price set under Pricing for everything is inclusive of any advertisers, brands, sizes, creative types, and so forth, even those you selected above this option. Learn more about pricing for everything.

      Target mobile interstitials: Under "Sizes," select both:

      • "Out-of-page", matching the creative delivered, and
      • The mobile interstitial sizes (1024x768, 768x1024, 320x480, 480x320), matching the request size.
      Do not set up pricing rules that target specific video creative sizes

      Because video creative size is not a good indication of the video player size, unified pricing rules targeting creative size are not matched with ad requests.

      To traffic to in-stream video, make sure the "Sizes" field has a value of Any size. If your unified pricing rules rely on size-based targeting for in-stream video inventory, you should use a different targeting method. For instance, ad units and key-values.

   2. Select how you want to set floor prices:
      • Set floor prices: Lowest winning bid must be no less than the floor price.
      • Set target CPMs (default): This is an alternative way of setting a floor price that allows for increased fill rate and yield, while still maintaining an average minimum price for your inventory. Leveraging Google's machine learning expertise, target CPM dynamically adjusts the floor price on matching inventory to maximize yield. 
      • Let Google optimize floor prices ^(Beta) : If you selected Set pricing for everything above, you can leverage Google's machine learning expertise to automatically set floor prices per-query that maximize yield while protecting long-term inventory value. 
6. Click Save.

Manage and troubleshoot unified pricing rules

Ad Manager provides a number of tools and a reporting dimension to help manage your inventory in the auction and pricing.

Affected line items from any rule

For any unified pricing rule you create, you can review the number of remnant line items below the price set in the rule. Total line items shown compares the price in a rule with the CPM of remnant line items, and does not take targeting into account.

To see affected line items, enter a floor price or target CPM. The "Affected remnant line items" section lists any Price Priority, Network and Bulk line items that are below the price you specified. For instance, you might see:

There are 29 line items below the floor price set in this rule

Click the number of line items (in this case, "29 line items") to be taken to table filtered for affected line items.

Troubleshooting

Line items that are below the price set in unified pricing rules appear in line item troubleshooting. For "Non-delivery causes", you'll find the a "Below pricing rule floor" reason. From here, you can click through to the pricing rules that are affecting the line items in question. Learn more about troubleshooting using below pricing rule floor.

Report on unified pricing rules

To report on unified pricing rule activity, select the Unified pricing rule dimension under the "Historical" report type. 

Report on multi-size pricing

Report on multi-size requests using the "Requested ad sizes" dimension and bid metrics.

No pricing rule applied 

"(No pricing rule applied)" is used in the following cases:

• The impression went unfilled.
• No unified pricing rule matched the request.
• The auction candidate is not eligible for unified pricing (for example, when a Standard, Sponsorship, or House line item type won the impression.)