Enhance marketing intelligence with AI-integrated data
GET A DEMO
AI-fueled marketing dashboards
All
Take full control of all your marketing data

GDN vs. DV360: How to Choose the Best Display Ad Platform

Google offers two robust solutions for display advertising—Google Display Network (GDN) and Display & Video 360 (DV360). While both platforms are part of the Google ecosystem, they serve distinct roles depending on the scale, complexity, and objectives of campaigns.

This guide explores the core differences between GDN and DV360, offering insights into how each platform can best serve different advertising needs.

Maximize ROAS with Marketing Data Governance
Automatically validate campaign, brand, and data compliance for complex ad campaigns on Google Display Network, Display and Video 360, and other advertising platforms with Marketing Data Governance. It is a robust solution for quality assurance across various aspects of campaign execution and analytics, from campaign setup and targeting to brand safety and metric pacing.

GDN and DV360: Overview

Google Display Network is a vast advertising network that allows brands to display visual ads on millions of websites, apps, and videos.

Google Display Network (GDN) is one of the largest global ad networks, reaching over 90% of internet users across millions of websites, apps, and Google-owned properties like YouTube and Gmail. GDN enables advertisers to place display ads, including images, videos, and rich media, across a vast range of publisher sites.

GDN is well-suited for campaigns focused on brand awareness, audience reach, and retargeting: 

  • Its vast reach makes it ideal for businesses looking to increase visibility and exposure across a wide range of websites and apps.
  • GDN is particularly effective for retargeting campaigns, allowing advertisers to re-engage users who have visited their site or interacted with their brand, driving them back to complete a purchase or other desired actions.
  • Additionally, GDN supports custom intent and affinity audiences, helping advertisers reach users who are actively searching for products or services similar to what they offer. 

GDN also integrates seamlessly with Google Ads, offering detailed reporting, campaign management, and bidding options, such as cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), and cost-per-acquisition (CPA). 

DV360 is a comprehensive demand-side programmatic advertising platform.

In contrast, Display & Video 360 (DV360) is Google’s advanced programmatic advertising platform, offering a comprehensive solution for planning, executing, and optimizing digital media campaigns across multiple channels, including display, video, connected TV, audio, and mobile.

DV360 offers more comprehensive control over ad placement, creative optimization, and audience targeting, making it ideal for advertisers managing large budgets and looking for granular optimization options across a wide range of inventory, including premium video content​.

As part of the Google Marketing Platform, DV360 integrates seamlessly with other Google tools, such as Google Analytics 360 and Campaign Manager 360, providing unified campaign management and reporting.

Google Display Network vs. DV360: Comparative Table

Aspect Google Display Network (GDN) Display & Video 360 (DV360)
Primary Function Simplified display advertising within Google's ecosystem. Comprehensive programmatic media buying platform with advanced targeting across multiple channels.
Ad Inventory Limited to Google-owned and partner sites in the Google Display Network. Access to multiple ad exchanges, including premium inventory across display, video, CTV, audio, and mobile apps.
Targeting Options Basic targeting options like keywords, demographics, interests, and retargeting within Google’s ecosystem. Advanced targeting, including custom affinity, in-market, third-party data, lookalike modeling, and dynamic remarketing.
Programmatic Buying Not a programmatic platform; manual campaign management via Google Ads. Full programmatic platform with real-time bidding (RTB) and Programmatic Guaranteed deals.
Creative Capabilities Basic creative support (image and text ads) and responsive ads within Google’s ad formats. Advanced creative capabilities, including Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) for real-time personalized ad creatives.
Audience Data Uses Google’s first-party data (e.g., search, YouTube behavior) for targeting. Leverages first, second, and third-party data, including data from external sources for precise targeting.
Cross-Channel Reach Primarily display ads on Google-owned and partner websites, YouTube, and mobile apps. Multi-channel support, including display, video, connected TV, mobile, audio, and app ads across various platforms.
Integration Integrated with Google Ads and basic Google Analytics reporting. Deep integration with the entire Google Marketing Platform (Google Analytics 360, Campaign Manager 360, etc.).
Real-Time Bidding (RTB) Not supported; manual bidding is required. Full real-time bidding across multiple ad exchanges and private marketplace deals.
Optimization Manual optimizations with automated bidding strategies (e.g., Smart Bidding). Automated optimization features using AI for dynamic bidding, creative optimization, and audience targeting.
Attribution Basic conversion tracking via Google Ads and Google Analytics. Advanced attribution models, including multi-touch attribution and cross-device tracking.
Reporting Basic reporting through Google Ads with standard metrics like clicks, impressions, and conversions. Advanced, customizable reporting with granular metrics on performance, attribution, and cross-channel insights.
Best for Small to medium businesses looking for simple display advertising solutions within Google’s ecosystem. Enterprises and agencies needing large-scale programmatic media buying, cross-channel reach, and advanced targeting.

In the following sections, let's take a closer look at the differences between GDN and DV360.

1. Reach and Scale

Google Display Network offers substantial reach within the Google ecosystem, providing access to over 2 million websites, mobile apps, and key Google properties such as YouTube, Gmail, and Google Discover. 

However, this reach is confined to Google-owned and partner sites, limiting its scope to inventory controlled by Google and its direct partners. This makes GDN a powerful option for advertisers seeking broad reach, but only within the Google ecosystem.

DV360, on the other hand, extends far beyond Google’s network, offering access to multiple ad exchanges and premium publishers across a variety of platforms, including display, video, connected TV, and audio. DV360 allows advertisers to scale their campaigns globally, leveraging inventory from Google and external exchanges like OpenX, AppNexus, and more.

DV360 also supports private marketplace (PMP) deals and Programmatic Guaranteed deals, providing access to high-quality, brand-safe inventory that is not available on GDN, further enhancing its global reach and scale.

2. Creatives

GDN offers basic creative capabilities, supporting standard image ads, responsive display ads, text ads, and video ads across Google’s network of websites, apps, and properties. 

Responsive Display Ads are a key feature, as they automatically adjust size, format, and appearance to fit various placements, simplifying creative management for advertisers. GDN allows advertisers to upload image assets, logos, and text, and the platform dynamically combines these to create ad variations, reducing the complexity of manual creative creation. 

While these capabilities are efficient for simpler campaigns, GDN is somewhat limited in its support for more complex or interactive ad formats.

DV360 offers a variety of targeting options based on first-party data.

DV360 provides a more sophisticated set of tools for creative asset management and supports a wide range of formats, including rich media, interactive display ads, native ads, video, audio, and connected TV (CTV) ads. 

One standout feature is Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), which enables real-time personalization of ad creatives based on user data like location, device, or behavior. 

In addition, DV360 offers Ad Canvas, an integrated design tool that allows advertisers to build custom interactive and rich media ads without needing extensive coding skills. 

Another helpful feature is the Format Gallery, which provides a library of pre-built templates for rich media and interactive ads, speeding up the creative process and offering inspiration for ad design. 

DV360 also integrates with Google Studio, enabling collaboration on advanced creative projects, testing various creative formats, and managing multiple creative versions tailored to different audiences and channels.

3. Audiences

Google Display Network offers robust but somewhat basic audience targeting options compared to DV360, leveraging Google’s vast first-party data from its search, YouTube, and other properties. 

GDN allows advertisers to target users through:

  • Demographic Targeting: Target based on age, gender, parental status, and household income.
  • Interest Targeting (Affinity and In-Market Audiences): Affinity audiences help target users based on their long-term interests, while in-market audiences focus on those actively researching or looking to buy specific products or services.
  • Keyword and Contextual Targeting: Ads are shown based on the relevance of keywords to the content of a web page or app. This ensures that ads are displayed in contextually relevant environments.
  • Remarketing: Retarget users who have previously interacted with your site, app, or ads.
  • Custom Audiences: Advertisers can create custom segments by combining keywords, URLs, and apps to reach more refined audiences.

GDN’s audience targeting capabilities are particularly effective for advertisers looking to focus their efforts within Google’s ecosystem, such as YouTube, Gmail, and Google Display Network sites. 

However, its targeting is limited to Google-owned data and lacks access to more advanced third-party data integrations that DV360 provides.

DV360 offers significantly more advanced and flexible audience targeting options

It integrates with Google’s first-party data, second-party and third-party data providers, allowing advertisers to access a much broader range of audience data. 

DV360’s targeting options include, but not limited to:

  • Affinity and In-Market Audiences: Similar to GDN, but with deeper segmentation and customization options using more granular data.
  • Custom Affinity Audiences: This allows advertisers to build highly personalized audience segments based on URLs, apps, and keywords. Advertisers can refine their targeting to align more closely with specific behaviors and interests.
  • Custom Intent Audiences: Enables advertisers to target users based on their search behavior or other intent-driven actions, such as specific purchases or recent interests.
  • Lookalike Modeling: DV360 allows advertisers to create lookalike audiences, expanding their reach by targeting new users who behave similarly to existing high-value customers.
  • Third-Party Data Integration: One of DV360’s biggest advantages is its integration with a wide range of third-party data providers, allowing for highly specialized audience segments based on purchase behavior, financial demographics, media consumption, and more.
  • Programmatic Remarketing: Beyond basic remarketing, DV360 allows for advanced dynamic remarketing, enabling personalized ads based on the specific actions a user has taken on a website or app.
  • Geo and Device Targeting: DV360 provides advanced geographical and device targeting, allowing advertisers to tailor their campaigns to specific regions, devices, or even connection types.

Furthermore, DV360 allows advertisers to build Custom Audience Lists from multiple data sources and integrate offline data (such as CRM data) to create even more tailored segments. This provides far more flexibility and control over audience segmentation, making DV360 ideal for advertisers with complex, data-driven campaign strategies.

Pro tip: Automatically validate the targeting parameters on GDN and DV360 with Marketing Data Governance to minimize ad wastage and ensure your ads reach the target audience. It's a robust solution that verifies that the targeting accurately matches the intended audience and alerts you on any issues and deviations.

4. Reporting and Analytics

GDN offers basic reporting and analytics through the Google Ads interface, providing advertisers with standard performance metrics such as clicks, impressions, CTR, conversions. CPC, and conversion value.

Google Display Network also provides basic insights into audience demographics and geography, allowing advertisers to understand where their traffic is coming from. 

However, its analytics are mostly limited to the performance of campaigns within Google’s network. The reporting capabilities are easy to use and sufficient for small to medium-sized businesses but lack the depth and cross-channel insights that larger, data-driven enterprises may require.

DV360 offers advanced reporting and analytics features.

DV360 integrates with the entire Google Marketing Platform, including Google Analytics 360 and Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), allowing advertisers to access more comprehensive, cross-channel performance data. Key reporting features of DV360 include:

  • Cross-Channel Attribution: DV360 allows for detailed multi-channel attribution reporting, tracking user interactions across display, video, mobile, connected TV, and audio. 
  • Granular Insights: Advertisers can view in-depth performance data by audience segment, creative, device, geography, and even individual publishers.
  • Custom Reports and Dashboards: DV360 enables the creation of custom reports with user-defined metrics, allowing advertisers to track performance based on their unique goals and KPIs.
  • Data-Driven Attribution Models: DV360 supports advanced attribution models, such as data-driven attribution (DDA), which uses machine learning to analyze historical data and assign conversion credit based on the impact of each touchpoint in the user journey.
  • Real-Time Reporting: DV360 offers real-time analytics, allowing advertisers to track the performance of their campaigns as they happen and make adjustments immediately.
  • Inventory & Viewability Metrics: DV360 provides advanced metrics on viewability and inventory quality, helping advertisers understand where their ads are shown and whether they’re likely to be seen by the target audience.
  • Third-Party Integration: DV360 also allows integration with third-party measurement and verification tools, such as DoubleVerify and MOAT, for tracking ad viewability, brand safety, and ad fraud prevention.
  • Creative Performance Insights: DV360 offers insights into which creative versions are performing best, allowing advertisers to test and optimize creatives dynamically for improved outcomes.

5. Cost and Performance

The cost models of GDN and DV360 reflect their differing focuses. 

GDN typically uses a Cost Per Click (CPC) model, making it a more budget-friendly option for advertisers focused on maximizing reach and engagement at a lower cost​. This platform also supports Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions (CPM) pricing models.

In contrast, DV360 is geared toward larger advertisers, agencies, and enterprises, and its cost structure reflects its more advanced features. DV360 offers the following pricing models:

  • Dynamic CPM (dCPM): DV360 automatically adjusts bids based on real-time data to maximize performance while staying within budget.
  • Programmatic Guaranteed: Fixed pricing for premium inventory, ensuring guaranteed delivery on select platforms or with specific publishers.
  • Target CPA (tCPA): Similar to GDN, but with more advanced optimization for cross-channel performance.

DV360 generally has higher costs than GDN due to its access to premium inventory, advanced targeting capabilities, and integration with private marketplaces (PMPs). DV360 provides access to exclusive inventory through Programmatic Guaranteed and PMP deals, allowing advertisers to place ads in more premium environments, often resulting in better performance but at a higher cost.

6. Brand Safety

Brand safety is a critical consideration for advertisers, and both GDN and DV360 provide tools to address it. 

Brand Safety in Google Display Network is maintained primarily through Google’s built-in controls, such as content exclusions, sensitive category blocking, and placement reports that allow advertisers to exclude specific websites or apps from their campaigns. 

Advertisers can also use ad verification tools provided by Google to ensure that their ads are displayed in brand-safe environments. 

However, GDN’s brand safety controls are more standardized and somewhat limited compared to DV360.

Brand Safety in Display & Video 360 is significantly more advanced, offering advertisers enhanced control over where their ads appear. 

DV360 integrates with leading third-party verification partners such as DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), providing robust monitoring and protection against ad fraud, non-human traffic, and low-quality placements. 

DV360 also supports Programmatic Guaranteed deals and Private Marketplaces (PMPs), which allow advertisers to access premium inventory in highly controlled and brand-safe environments. 

These features provide advertisers with greater confidence that their ads will be shown in appropriate contexts and protect brand reputation in sensitive markets.

Conclusion: Choosing between GDN and DV360

The choice between GDN and DV360 depends largely on the campaign’s scale, complexity, and goals. 

  • GDN is an excellent choice for advertisers seeking a straightforward solution to reach a broad audience at a lower cost.
  • For advertisers managing larger budgets or needing more advanced targeting, premium inventory access, and detailed reporting, DV360 offers the necessary tools and flexibility to optimize performance across multiple channels. 

By understanding the strengths and limitations of each platform, marketing teams can make informed decisions that align with their strategic objectives and deliver more effective campaigns.

Regardless of the platform you choose, success of campaigns depends on flawless execution and continuous optimization.

For better control over campaign execution and greater optimization capabilities, integrate Marketing Data Governance.

Marketing Data Governance is an AI-powered solution for campaign, data, and performance compliance monitoring.
Campaign data governance dashboard

It is a powerful solution for campaign, brand and data compliance, governing campaigns on Display & Video 360, Google Display Network, Google Ads, and many other advertising platforms.

Marketing Data Governance assists at all stages of the campaign lifecycle:

  • Pre-launch: Marketing Data Governance validates campaign setup, including targeting parameters, creative elements, budgets, and brand safety.
  • In-flight: Marketing Data Governance monitors whether campaigns meet your performance expectations and benchmarks. For example, the platform monitors and notifies you when the average cost per click exceeds the benchmark, CTR drops, or line items exceed a certain number of clicks.
  • Post-campaign: Marketing Data Governance validates the reliability of campaign data, including UTM naming conventions and data extraction statuses, and identifies any irregularities that could skew analytics results. 

The platform alerts on any anomalies and rule breaks and displays the overall state of campaign governance on a clear dashboard for further review and analysis.

Get a demo of Marketing Data Governance and see how it can help you thrive in the highly competitive digital advertising space by continuously optimizing ROAS.

FAQ

What is the main difference between GDN and DV360?

GDN primarily focuses on displaying ads across Google’s partner sites with broad targeting options, while DV360 is a demand-side platform offering advanced targeting, access to premium ad inventory, and detailed analytics for more complex campaigns.

Which platform is better for smaller budgets, GDN or DV360?

GDN is typically more suitable for advertisers with smaller budgets. It uses a cost-per-click (CPC) model and offers simple, effective access to Google’s partner network, making it ideal for campaigns focused on reach and brand awareness.

Why would advertisers choose DV360 over GDN?

Advertisers often choose DV360 for its broader reach, access to premium ad inventory across multiple exchanges, advanced targeting options, and comprehensive reporting. DV360 is particularly effective for larger, performance-driven campaigns that require granular control and optimization.

How do targeting capabilities differ between GDN and DV360?

GDN offers broad targeting options such as keywords, demographics, and interest-based targeting. DV360 provides more sophisticated options, including first-party and third-party data segments, cross-device targeting, and precise audience segmentation for advanced campaign strategies.

What kind of reporting and analytics does DV360 offer compared to GDN?

DV360 offers more advanced reporting and analytics through its integration with Google Marketing Platform tools like Campaign Manager 360. This allows for deeper insights into user behavior, cross-channel performance, and conversion paths, which are critical for optimizing large-scale campaigns.

No items found.
Take full control of all your marketing data

500+ data sources under one roof to drive business growth. 👇

Maximize Advertising Results with Marketing Data Governance

Maximize Advertising Results with Marketing Data Governance

GET A DEMO
Get up to 368% ROI
FREE GUIDE

Unshackling Marketing Insights With Advanced UTM Practices

GET A FREE GUIDE
FREE EBOOK

No items found.
Calculate how much time your marketing team can allocate from reporting to action 👉
Your data is on the way and we’ll be processed soon by our system. Please check your email in a few minutes.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.