The Forgotten Beta: Third-Party Ad Serving on the Google Display Network

Buried in the archives of the AdWords help site is an interesting gem: the ability to serve third-party ads on the Google Display Network. What’s a third-party ad? Let me explain.

Virtually all display ads trafficked on the internet are stored on dedicated computers called ad servers, which are separate from the servers which host websites. Think of ad servers as giant warehouses for ads. When you post a display ad in the AdWords UI, that ad is stored on a Google ad server. For most other display ad networks, ads are stored on ad serving platforms like Dart for Advertisers, Atlas, and MediaPlex.

When a user visits a website, that site may contain a snippet of code called a ‘tag’ that retrieves a display ad from the ad server to show on the page. This also occurs on sites in the Google Display Network. On those sites, a Google tag retrieves the ad from Google’s ad servers. The concept of third-party ad serving is simple; instead of the Google tag pulling an ad from Google’s ad server, it pulls the ad from the advertiser’s ad server (the advertiser is the ‘third party’).

The key benefit of this is that advertisers can update their ads on their ad server and the ads will automatically be updated as they run on the Google Display Network. This can be a huge benefit for advertiser with constantly changing ads. For example, travel companies can update fares, ecommerce providers can change which product they showcase, and deal sites can show a daily deal – all without having to manually post hundreds of ads to the AdWords UI. In addition, this beta is an easy way for companies that do a lot of display advertising to extend their reach on the Google Display Network.

This may also be the future direction of display ads on the Google Display Network. With their acquisition of Teracent, it’s only a matter of time before we see dynamic display ads that automatically update based on the cookie of the individual viewer. Think of it as remarketing 2.0 – display ads with intelligence.

So what’s the downside? Per Google “Third-party ad serving is available by invitation only to a select number of participants”, so unless you have a good relationship with your search engine rep, you may be out of luck. Also, there are also a lot of requirements on the acceptable ad format (found here: http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94230), though these are somewhat similar to the existing policies for the Google Display Network.