Google's Suit of Products Greatly Influences how Publishers and Advertisers Select Where to Buy Ads

III. DISPLAY ADVERTISING TRANSACTIONS

C. How Publishers and Advertisers Select Ad Tech Tools

60. Publishers and advertisers try to optimize their use of ad tech to meet their revenue or advertising goals. As a general matter, publishers use only one publisher ad server to manage ad inventory in order to avoid discrepancies in tracking revenue or impressions and to minimize the burden of having employees oversee two largely duplicative systems. Ultimately, there can only be one publisher ad server acting as the final decision-maker as to which advertisement will fill each impression.

61. Sizeable publishers generally prefer to offer their inventory for sale through more than one ad exchange (a practice called “multi-homing”). This increases the likelihood that an advertiser on one or more of the ad exchanges will be able to “match” the advertising opportunity offered by the publisher to a user or category of user that an advertiser particularly values and therefore is willing to compete to buy. When publishers are able to offer their inventory for sale through multiple ad exchanges simultaneously, it causes ad exchanges to compete with each other to provide the best “match” or the lowest revenue share. However, there are integration, contracting, and other costs associated with the publisher adding each additional ad exchange.

62. Likewise, advertisers often connect with multiple ad exchanges through their advertiser buying tools, hoping that exposure to as much advertising inventory as possible will increase the likelihood of reaching the advertisers’ intended targets for their advertising campaigns at the lowest cost. Using multiple ad exchanges also allows advertisers to compare performance between ad exchanges. Similarly, when advertisers are able to freely multi-home among ad exchanges, it forces ad exchanges to compete with each other to provide advertisers the best return on their advertising expenditures.

63. Although there are a number of factors that advertisers consider when deciding which ad exchanges and/or ad buying tools to use, one key driver is access to especially valuable advertising inventory. Some ad tech products can be used to buy or sell both open web display advertising—the focus of this Complaint—as well as other types of advertising, such as advertising inventory that is “owned-and-operated” (“O&O”) by the company offering the ad tech product.

64. For example, some of Google’s ad tech products allow advertisers to buy both open web display advertising on third-party websites as well as advertising on Google’s O&O properties. Google’s O&O properties include several market-leading sources of non-open web display advertising inventory, such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Android’s Google Play Store, among others. Advertisers and advertising agencies looking to advertise on these O&O properties often must adopt at least one of Google’s advertising tools to do so effectively. For example, many larger advertisers and ad agencies seeking to promote their brands through online video advertising on the market-leading YouTube website generally must use Google’s advertising tools to do so; so for them, as well, adoption of Google’s ad tech tools is considered a must.

65. If an advertiser or advertising agency believes it needs Google’s tools for purposes of Google O&O advertising, it is less likely to adopt another buying tool—or tools—to advertise on the open web. Among other considerations, the adoption of multiple ad tech tools typically costs more (in time and money) and limits the ability of the ad tech tools to share important performance data across these tools. As a result, companies with especially valuable O&O advertising—such as Google—may be able to take advantage of existing, sizeable advertising bases already locked into their advertising tools