Did you think that with Header Bidding and RTB you could give equal opportunities to all bidders and get more income by increasing competition?

With the recent integration of the Prefered deals within Google Admanager, the free competition with header bidding is skipped and limits access to the inventory of any other SSP.

Google, in its latest update of Prefered Deal and its integration in GAM, manages to eliminate at a stroke the rest of the SSPs in the market, connected through Header Bidding. The most important thing is that in any standard prebid configuration (the recommended one), bids will never compete with deals created in the new system, so it is increasingly far from a bid-based optimization model.

Undoubtedly, with this, any company that uses GAM will no longer be eligible for the benefits of header bidding unless it modifies the priority levels of its line items (usually price priority) so that deals generated from other SSP's can access with equal opportunities to the inventory and be able to win the bid in case the price paid is higher.

With this move, and reducing the URL blocking functionality for these deals, Google shows us again how the design and functionality of its Ad Manager and Ad Exchange products changes to direct all the benefits in their products, instead of allowing to the customers of their products choose how to configure them.

"Priority and Preferred Deals"

The Preferred Deals line item type has a fixed priority value that ensures it wins ahead of the Open Auction and all other line item types except Sponsorship and Standard line items, including those created under Programmatic Guaranteed. This means that:

Sponsorship and Standard line items serve ahead of Preferred Deals.

Preferred Deals serve ahead of Price priority, Network, and Bulk line items, including third-party line items, and ahead of any line items set to "House".

https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/7630763#new-pd