• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 30, 2019

Google Display & Video 360 on Tuesday will introduce ways to help prevent advertisers from buying unauthorized web and app ad inventory, and provide better controls through a dashboard that determines where the digital ads will serve up.

Google, which supports the ads.txt standard created by the IAB Tech Lab, is working to encourage app developers to publish only app-ads.txt files. In the next few months, Display & Video 360 will stop buying of unauthorized app inventory.

When adoption of app-ads.txt reaches sufficient levels, it will allow marketers and agencies to choose to buy only authorized app inventory, Payam Shodjai, director of product management at Google Marketing Platform, wrote in a blog post.

In August, Google plans to make ads.txt the default setting for all new web campaigns created in Display & Video 360. The strategy will ensure that, by default, advertisers only buy authorized inventory.

The IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt standard, created to reduce fraud for campaigns running on the web, is a text file that allows publishers to openly identify themselves as authorized to sell their inventory programmatically. More than 93% of the web inventory available in Display & Video 360 is authorized by ads.txt files.

Google also introduced Brand Controls, which gives advertisers one view of the brand suitability settings, campaigns using ads.txt-only authorized sellers, and verification services across all campaigns.

Shodjai said that greater control is now offered for all settings. Ads will only appear in contexts defined as suitable for the brand across display, video, apps and TrueView. “For example, let’s say you realize that some of your campaigns are not using any digital content label exclusions,” Shodjai wrote. “You can quickly make bulk edits with Structured Data Files and immediately change the settings across multiple campaigns, right from the Brand Controls dashboard.”

Brand Controls will produce a report showing the percentage of traffic filtered before a bid was placed, using built-in fraud detection and brand suitability safeguards, as well as providing reasons for the outcomes.

The dashboard also makes it easy to track edits to ensure that the media team follows the guidelines setup to protect advertisers' campaigns.