Flattened Bid Requests

Flattened Bid Requests help third-party bidders make smarter decisions and understand what types of creatives are eligible on bid requests. By flattening bid requests, the publisher's queries are separated into distinct individual bid requests to make it easier for third-party bidders to understand and bid on RTB inventory. For detailed developer documentation, see the Authorized Buyers Real-Time Bidding (RTB) Protocol. 

Instances where you would flatten bid requests:

Video ad pods

An example of this would be TV commercial breaks where there are multiple ads shown back-to-back. Instead of receiving one bid request for the entire commercial break (e.g. 3 minutes), it's split into multiple distinct bid requests, one for each ad opportunity.

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 truly are individual ad opportunities and therefore there is no reason to opt-out.

Deal types

There will be a bid request for each deal type (not per Deal ID):
  • 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 is 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 will only appear in the bid request of the deal type that they are attributed to (all_sizes will appear in all bid requests).

Note that 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 going to RTB Keys and then Disable Deal type Flattening and checking "Disables flattening of bid requests based on deal types."

Formats

An example of this would be the repeated field for banners, native, and video in RTB. The publisher query is split into multiple distinct bid requests, each having one format. Note that 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 going to RTB Keys and then Allow Bid Requests with Multiple Formats and unchecking "Allows the bidder to receive a bid request with multiple formats." 

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:

Frequency asked questions

Will flattening bid requests show up as multiple requests in reporting and RTB Breakout?

Yes, note that this may cause bid requests to exceed inventory matches in reporting.

How will flattening bid requests for Deal Types affect deal 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.
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