Announcing the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange

You may have seen our post on the Official Google Blog, announcing the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace to buy and sell display advertising space.

The "buyers" in the Ad Exchange are typically ad networks and agency-run networks with their own ad serving and optimization technologies, while the "sellers" are large publishers.

We're excited about what the launch of the Ad Exchange means for you, our advertisers. Ad Exchange sites will now be available for you to advertise on, as part of the Google Content Network, through your AdWords account. These sites are made available to you when Ad Exchange publishers choose to allow AdWords advertisers to compete for their inventory, and as long as that inventory meets all AdSense policy requirements.

So when you advertise on the Google Content Network, your ads will now be eligible to run across additional high-quality placements on those Ad Exchange sites, in addition to the hundreds and thousands of placements your ads can run on in the Google Content Network.

These placements will appear like any other Content Network placement in your AdWords reports. Like all Content Network placements, you can use the Placement Performance Report to see where your ads ran, which placements performed best, and act on that information by increasing or decreasing bids based on each placement's performance. On occasion, an Ad Exchange site may choose to remain anonymous, in which case, the site will appear in your reports with an anonymized label like "123456.anonymous.google." You can choose to exclude this placement, just like you can exclude any placement in the Content Network, if you see it's not meeting your performance goals.

You can still use all the AdWords targeting, bidding, formats, reporting, and controls for the Content Network that you're already familiar with. This just means that there will be more high-quality sites that you can access. As always, sites must meet the same quality requirements that we apply to all sites in the Google Content Network. Also, this change does not affect your search campaigns.

You can learn more about how the DoubleClick Ad Exchange can benefit you in the AdWords Help Center.

If you're not currently using the Google Content Network, you can learn more about how to get started here. If you're using the Content Network but have never tried running display ad formats, you might check out our Display Ad Builder tool, which can help you create new display ads in minutes.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew