Support Agency Partners

This article describes how Demand-Side Platforms (DSP) can support agencies by integrating with the Agency platform, providing holistic reporting and workflow efficiencies to agencies and publishers.

Agencies can negotiate and strike programmatic non-guaranteed deals directly with publishers. These Agency-level deals will be negotiated between the agency account and the publisher, and can then be transacted across all DSPs that were set up in the agency account. When an Agency Deal is created, a universal deal ID is generated which is used by all participating DSPs. This reduces duplicate deal IDs (one per DSP seat) for the same campaign.

Integration requirements to transact using an Agency Seat

Agencies provide Google with a list of their DSP Seat IDs from each DSP in the DSP’s namespace, which Google will map to their Agency Seat. DSPs will be required to return the DSP Seat ID in their bid response so spend can be correctly associated with the agency.

• OpenRTB specification (either JSON or Protobuf): fill the seat field on the seatbid. For partners that already fill this field, no immediate action is required.
• Populate advertiser_domain field in bid responses in addition to the agency's DSP Seat ID.

For bidders that are integrated with our Marketplace API, Google will return deals that agencies have struck in the bidder-scoped finalized deal resource. Given that these deals are not owned by the bidder, agency deals returned in this resource will be read-only and will not have a corresponding proposal.

Deal flow and API requirements to support non-guaranteed deals

Deals are negotiated between agencies and publishers directly through Google user interfaces.

• A publisher may create a proposal through the Google Ad Manager user interface for Agency A. 
• Agency A will login to their Agency Account user interface to accept the proposal or negotiate changes. 
• Once a deal is finalized and active, it will become visible to the Agency’s selected DSPs. These Agency deals (unlike traditional deals) are read-only from the perspective of the DSP but are not immutable (Agencies can renegotiate terms through Google user interfaces).

To access finalized agency deals, DSPs should integrate with the Authorized buyer Marketplace API.

Key integration points for bidders /DSPs:

• Obtain Finalized Deals through the bidder-level Finalized Deals API: Agency deals are owned by the Agency Seat, not a DSP-managed account. Consequently, the buyers.finalizedDeals and buyers.proposals endpoints will not return these deals. Bidders can also use the bidder-level Finalized Deals API to obtain a complete list of their finalized deals.
• Auction Packages: In a similar process, bidders can fetch auction packages by calling the bidders.auctionPackages.list endpoint.

API Object Updates: The existing Deals API object will be extended to include additional information related to Agency Accounts. The following changes (shown in bold) detail the additions to the public documentation.

Example

JSON representation of a Deal

{

  // ...

 

  // ... When the media_planner field

  // is populated, this field is empty and the billed buyer is

  // determined based on the bid response.

  // Format: `buyers/{buyerAccountId}`

  "billedBuyer" : string

 

   // Union field negotiating_buyer can be only one of the following:

  "buyer": string,

  "client": string,

 // This field represents a media planner (For example, agency or big  

 // advertiser).

 "mediaPlanner" : {

    object (MediaPlanner)

 }

  // End of list of possible types for union field negotiating_buyer.

 

 // If set, this field contains the list of DSP specific seat ids that 

  // are eligible to transact on this deal.

  "eligibleSeatId": [

   string

 ],

 

  // ...

}

Note: These important changes:

• New mediaPlanner field that can be used to identify Agency-specific deals.
• The billedBuyer field will be empty for Agency-specific deals.
• New eligibleSeatIds field contains the set of seats in the DSP’s own namespace that are eligible to bid on the deal. Bid responses for the deal with no seat ID specified or a seat ID not in this list will be filtered by Google.

Deal flow and API requirements to support Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) deals

For DSPs to buy PG deals created in an Agency Seat, there are a few additional requirements to the flow to support guaranteed deals.

1. Similar to non-guaranteed deals, PG deals become visible to the agency’s selected DSP once the deal is finalized. However, deal transactions do not begin until proper setup has happened. 
2. After deal finalization, agencies should configure the creatives and spend of the deal in the DSP’s system. Once this configuration step is completed, DSP can notify Google by calling the Authorized Buyer Marketplace API. Specifically, the bidder-level finalized deals API have a new endpoint called SetReadyToServe.
3. When SetReadyToServe is invoked on a deal, the deal becomes active, and Google begins to send bid requests to the selected DSP after the specified start time of the deal. At this point, follow the bidding guideline for PG deals.
   Note:  The must_bid signal must be respected to stay within PG bidding SLA.