• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 7 hours ago

Google quietly rebranded its "unified pricing rules" (UPRs) to "pricing rules" in Ad Manager (AdX) in December, allowing publishers to set bidder-specific floor prices again.  Many publishers are just now experimenting and seeing results from the revised feature.

The rules were introduced in 2019 as UPRs to stop publishers from setting higher floor prices in Google AdX versus other programmatic platforms.

The rebranding of these rules once again allows publishers to set bidder-specific prices within Google Ad Manager, which can help publishers counterbalance any data advantage that Google may still own, according to Vijay Kumar, founder and chief executive officer at Mile AI.

“UPR was brought up during Google’s monopoly trials,” he said, mainly in the context of Google owning the ad server and demand product. “They are giving more control to publishers, but it might be too late.”

The rollback came at the end of major antitrust actions by the U.S. and Europe when regulators found Google’s previous pricing model and other ad-technology practices to be anticompetitive. 

Google explained the new pricing rules in a blog post.

Kumar said Mile AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) advertising layer, has been testing the rebranded model with publishers since Google reinstated it.

He has seen changes such as shifts in win rates, CPMs, and inventory after UPR was removed.

Kumar spoke with MediaPost about some adoption strategies by publishers to manage this change, as well as how they can measure the impact and success of bidder-specific tasks in Google Ad Manager.

Kumar ran early tests for a U.S. sports and gaming publisher that made specific changes to how AdX in the auction.

The publisher estimates responsibility for nearly 40% of Google Ad Manager revenue share. 

Header bidding and Amazon price floor settings remained the same, while dynamic Sophisticated Pricing rules were applied to AdX.

Within two to three weeks of the test, total revenue per mile (RPMs) rose between 7% and 11%, and AdX’s win rate fell between 8% and 13%. This means that the ads won fewer auctions than before, but CPMs cleared between 9% and 17%, resulting in higher AdX RPMs. The wins were more important, Kumar said.

He said the results have much to do with the amount of demand and discipline of steady execution of campaigns, because making overly aggressive changes can impact the auction.

“The lift came from shifting auction outcomes toward genuinely competitive demand and higher clearing prices, rather than inflating bids across the board,” Kumar said, adding that he doesn’t know many publishers that have adopted this yet.