• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 1, 2015

Google made a move Tuesday to give select advertisers more insight into a publisher's available inventory before they make a programmatic bid to serve up an advertisement.

The option, available in DoubleClick for Publishers First Look, is similar to "header bidding," which allows publishers to see programmatic bids from advertisers before the platform pings the ad server. Yieldbot began offering an open-source framework for display advertising in early November to support marketers buying display and search advertising.

For those in Google's beta program, First Look allows buyers to see more available advertising inventory by putting them in real-time competition with each other. Publishers testing the tool have seen an average of 10% lift in revenue, Jonathan Bellack, director of product management at DoubleClick, wrote in a post.

One rapidly growing segment of programmatic advertising has been from high-CPM, low-match-rate buyers, such as remarketing. Now buyers are willing to pay a premium to publishers in exchange for a "first look" at their inventory, but they need to see a lot of impressions to find the ones they value most.

The standard implementation of this "first look" idea has been through a header bidding tag telling the server the advertiser has interest, Bellack explains. While it works, the old model has drawbacks. It adds latency to every page view, gives one buyer preferential access, and gives up the control and protection of an ad exchange.

Google engineers believe they have found a better solution in First Look to reduce or eliminate latency, enable any selected buyer to compete, and allow publishers to manage demand just as they do with other private or open marketplaces.

DoubleClick for Publishers First Look will become available to all publishers early in 2016.