DV360 is a demand-side platform (DSP) for buying ad inventory programmatically, while Campaign Manager is an ad server for generating ad tags. Both DV360 and Campaign Manager help advertisers accomplish their end goal of putting digital ads in front of people, although they accomplish this through different processes.
Here’s a summary of the process for purchasing impressions on DV360:
Create an Insertion Order (IO) in the Campaign. Set the IO’s flight dates, budget, pacing, frequency cap, and performance goal (e.g. target CPM, CPC)
Add line items to the IO. Set flight dates, inventory source targeting, budget, pacing, bid strategy, frequency cap, and the creatives you’re using
Set live and monitor performance
And here’s a summary of the Campaign Manager trafficking process:
Create a campaign
Create a placement in the campaign
Add creatives
Assign the placements, creatives, and landing pages to your ad
Generate and send tags to publishers
Right off the bat, you can see one of DV360’s advantages: not having to send tags to publishers. This might seem like a minor issue, but when you’re dealing with multiple clients and campaigns, pre-campaign tag testing, and multiple email threads, the chances for error can increase exponentially.
Now let’s compare Campaign Manager and DV360 on several other fronts:
Pacing
DV360 allows you to control pacing (the rate at which you spend your budget). You can choose to spend your budget quickly, evenly, or slightly faster than the latter. In contrast, if you were to send Campaign Manager ad tags to a publisher, you’d be giving more control to the publisher.
Media buying process
Both DV360 and Campaign Manager have features for streamlining the media buying process, which generally goes like this:
Advertiser sends Request For Proposal (RFP) to publisher
Negotiations
Signed IO
Billing
Without streamlined tools, this whole process is quite tedious, with face-to-face negotiations, phone calls, long email threads, printing, scanning/faxing IOs, and manual data entry.
Campaign Manager has a Planning tool that allows you to build a media plan, negotiate with the publisher, link the inventory in your media plan to Campaign Manager, and generate billing actualization spreadsheets. All this happens within Campaign Manager, which definitely reduces the amount of manual data entry you need to do.
DV360 takes this streamlined process a step further. In fact, DV360 has a range of deal types that have different levels of streamlining and automation. We’ll discuss these next.
Deal types
You can run the following deal types in DV360:
Programmatic Guaranteed (PG)
Preferred Deals
Private Auction
Open Auction
PG deals are essentially direct reservations with the power of automation. You get access to premium inventory without needing to send ad tags to the publisher, plus billing and collections are automated. This allows you to do away with a lot of paperwork. You could set up the same thing using Campaign Manager, but you’ll still have to go through the process of sending tags and reconciling budget manually.
Preferred deals are similar to PG deals in that there’s one seller and one buyer with a fixed CPM. The buyer also holds the advantage of paying only the fixed price if they bid above the fixed price. In contrast to PG deals, there’s more flexibility in that the advertiser gets first look at the inventory, but is able to turn the deal down if the deal terms aren’t met, after which the impressions go the private auction or open auction.
Private auctions involve one seller and several buyers. It is a second-price RTB auction with price floors. Although advertisers don’t pay a fixed price, they’re still able to access premium inventory and have access to this inventory before other buyers on the open auction.
Finally, open auctions are the closest thing to plug-and-play: put in your settings, and just leave it to run. Many publishers bid for space across many publishers. Although the open exchange tends to be lower quality, long tail inventory, the open auction gives broad reach, plus the ability to easily optimize mid-campaign.
As you can see, DV360 offers many more deal types than Campaign Manager. With PG, you’re basically setting up direct reservations more efficiently. With the open auction, you’re getting an incredible amount of reach that would be impossible to set up manually. Although you’ll need programmatic expertise to get the most of DV360, I’ve still found it to be far less tedious than setting up direct reservations.
Creatives
Both Campaign Manager and DV360 allow you to directly upload display, audio, and video ads. However, rich media creatives with advanced functionality (e.g. interstitials, expanding creatives, flexible dimensions) will have to be uploaded to either Campaign Manager or Studio.
With the launch of Google Marketing Platform, DV360 has several new formats such as Lightbox ads on GDN, Flipbook, and three new data-driven dynamic formats: Panorama, Cue Cards, and Blank Slate.
One of DV360’s limitations is that Studio creatives have to be pushed to Campaign Manager instead of DV360. As of August 2018, Google are working on tool that allows for direct syncing of creatives with DV360, but this still has very limited functionality.
Both Campaign Manager and DV360 support dynamic creatives that show tailored ad content to different people. You’ll first build dynamic creatives in Studio, after which you can employ a variety of dynamic campaign strategies. In both Campaign Manager and DV360, you can filter using 1st-party audience lists. You can use these audience lists for remarketing campaigns. In DV360 specifically, you can run ads that automatically update based on user data passed from both 1st- and 3rd-party data sources. You can also filter by line item. In Campaign Manager specifically, you can use Campaign Manager ID (e.g. Ad ID, Placement ID) filtering or targeting key filtering. Campaign Manager also supports time-of-day targeting.
You can also build dynamic creatives within DV360. This is specifically for advertisers with Google Merchant Center Accounts. You would need to upload a product feed to Google Merchant Center and create a DV360 pixel or Campaign Manager Floodlight tag and apply it to the product pages. This will add your website visitors to remarketing lists and associate them with the products they have viewed, allowing you to serve personalised ads to them.
Creative rotation is one aspect where DV360 and Campaign Manager differ. In DV360, you can assign more than one display creative of the same size to a line item. You can then set the creatives to rotate evenly, to serve the creative that attracts the most clicks, or to serve the creative that attracts the most conversions. In Campaign Manager, you have a wider variety of creative rotation options. You can have even rotation, a specific rotation sequence, custom rotation weights (e.g. 80%/20%), rotation based on highest CTR, or you can optimize for clicks, click-through conversions, view-through conversions, or video completions.
Frequency capping
Both DV360 and Campaign Manager offer the frequency cap functionality. On DV360, you can set frequency caps at the insertion order or line item level. On Campaign Manager, you set frequency caps at the ad level. Arguably, Campaign Manager gives you a bit more control because you can assign the same placement to multiple ads, and set different frequency caps for the different ads.
Pixels
A pixel is a piece of code that tracks conversion and adds people to remarketing lists. Here’s where Campaign Manager and DV360 are integrated. In 2017, Google released the global site tag (gtag.js) for Google products, including Google Analytics, Google Ads, DV360, Campaign Manager, and Search Ads 360. The global site tag comprises a global snippet that’s added to all pages of the site, and an event snippet that’s placed on pages that have events you’re tracking. With gtag.js, you don’t have to manage multiple tags for different products, and you have more accurate conversion tracking because the tag sets new cookies on your domain. Campaign Manager’s existing pixel, Floodlight, can be migrated to gtag.js. Alternatively, If you’re already using Google Tag Manager, all you need to do is to add the Conversion Linker tag to your containers. In DV360, you can create pixels for each event you want to track, and you can set the pixel format as a global site tag.
