Flattened bid requests help third-party bidders understand what types of creatives are eligible on bid requests. When you flatten bid requests, the publisher's queries are separated into distinct individual requests to make it easier for third-party bidders to bid on RTB inventory.
Review more details about bid flattening in the Authorized Buyers request guide.
When would you flatten bid requests?
Video ad pods
Multiple video ad pods may be sent as one bid request, or flattened into separate bid requests.
Example
TV commercial breaks have multiple ads shown back-to-back. Instead of receiving one bid request for the entire commercial break (which may be 3 minutes long), if you flatten bid requests each ad in the commercial break will be sent as distinct bid requests.
In certain cases for optimized pods, Programmatic Guaranteed and Preferred Deals are separated into their own bid requests because bids for these kinds of demands can only win in one pod position. This avoids sending duplicate bid requests for demand that can only win once per pod.
Can I opt-out of this?
No, there is no option to opt-out of this type of bid flattening.
Video ad pods represent a very small portion of inventory which have minimal impact on QPS. Additionally, they are always individual ad opportunities and therefore we believe there is no reason to opt-out.
Deal types
You can flatten bid requests by deal type:
- Programmatic Guaranteed deals: Infrequent and should not have a significant impact on queries per second (QPS)
- Preferred deals: More frequent than Programmatic Guaranteed deals and are likely to be responsible for any increases in QPS
- Private Auctions and Open Auctions: Private Auctions are targeted based on Open Auction parameters. Both Private Auctions and Open Auctions will always have the same targeting, therefore this targeting is sent as a single bid request
If skippability and max_ad_duration conflict across deal type, then they only appear in the bid request of the deal type that they are attributed to (all_sizes will appear in all bid requests).
At this time, you cannot flatten by Deal ID.
Bid flattening for deal types do not apply to Open Bidders.
Can I opt-out of this?
Yes, you can opt-out of bid flattening for deal types by accessing Bidder settings RTB settings.
Formats
There is one request for each format type, such as repeated banners, native, and video in RTB. The publisher query is split into multiple distinct bid requests, each having one format.
If you do not want to have bid requests flattened for Formats, contact your account manager.
Can I opt-out of this?
Yes, you can opt-out of bid flattening for formats by accessing Bidder settings RTB settings.
Correlate individual bid requests
If you want to correlate the individual bid requests together to a unique publisher query for offline analysis or bidding, pay attention to the field google_query_id in Google Protocol or OpenRTB extensions. This will be the same across all flattened requests.
// This represents a unique ID for the overall query. In the event
// that that there are multiple callouts for a query, all callout
// requests for that query will contain the same google_query_id
optional string google_query_id = 2;
Reports with flattened big requests
Flattened bid requests will appear as multiple requests in reporting and RTB breakout. This may cause bid requests to exceed inventory matches in reporting.
Flattened deal types in reporting
Reporting by deal will not be affected, but overall metrics like impressions per bid request may decrease since a buyer may send "winning bids" on two callouts that were for a single impression, so only one can win.