Are You Ready for the NEW First Look Pricing Rules?

Endeavoring to ensure a healthy and sustainable advertising ecosystem, on November 1, changes to the First Look pricing rules, announced by Google earlier this year, came into force.

First Look pricing rules – an overview

First Look pricing rules are a functionality of Ad Exchange connected with Google Ad Manager, which allows certain bids from an Open Auction to compete with Direct Campaigns. Until now, First Look afforded the possibility of:

• sharing or blocking selected inventory
• setting a minimum price above which a qualified bid would be able to show the ad before the Direct Campaigns
• setting prices and blocking for selected Advertisers

A bid via First Look must reach both the set bid and the CPM Value or rate (if the CPM value has not been set) for all “unguaranteed” advertising campaigns (Line Items).

In other words, First Look makes the ad inventory reserved for Direct Campaigns available to specific Open Auction Advertisers; if they are able to pay the set bids for such impressions.

What will be the changes to First Look pricing rules?

• Withdrawal of pricing and locking options for certain buyers.
• Removal of all existing pricing and locking options for specific buyers. 
• If an existing rule has pricing and blocking options for specific buyers only, the entire rule will be deleted.

In connection with the above, it is worth clarifying that:

• This change will not affect the ability to set prices and blocking options for Advertisers and Brands (Google blocks buyer support). This option will continue to be available.
• This change will not affect existing pricing and blocking options that contain advertisers or brands ONLY and will not be removed.
•  Existing pricing and blocking options that include BOTH Buyers and Advertisers or Brands will be removed.
• The change will not affect the ability to block buyers using protection rules.

What impact could the changes to the pricing rules have on your inventory?

It is worth noting that those First Look pricing rules that include the targeting of buyers have now been removed by Google. Therefore, we recommend that you review the new regulatory landscape as soon as possible and adjust them by changing targeting focus where possible from buyers to Advertisers or Brands.

Should you fail to take the appropriate steps, some price rules may end up being removed, with premium inventories sold so far ceasing to be made available through this channel. While Google is implementing these changes, the ability to overwrite the described rules will be blocked.

In other words, your First Look revenue may decline if you haven’t taken action before November 1.