Google Display & Video 360 (DV360) is Google's demand-side platform (DSP) for programmatic buying of display, video, mobile, and TV ads, giving advertisers extensive programmatic reach and precise targeting capabilities.
Google Display and Video 360 is a programmatic advertising platform. Extensive audience lists allow for in-depth targeting compared to classic keyword targeting in Google Ads.
Google says on its Display & Video 360 page that you can bid on or exclude impressions from dozens of third-party exchanges. An extensive network of partner companies that exchange data with Google, such as BlueKai, LiveRamp, and Eyeota, help make your ads more personalized and target the required audiences.
Free Download: DV360 Campaign Launch Checklist
End-to-end checklist for launching, monitoring, and optimizing DV360 programmatic campaigns. Covers setup, targeting, creatives, and reporting.
Download the ChecklistGoogle Display and Video 360 overview
The Hierarchy: Partners, Advertisers, and Campaigns
| Level | Description |
|---|---|
| Partner | This is the top-level account, typically representing an agency or a large holding company. It controls billing, user access, and global settings. |
| Advertiser | Each Advertiser represents a specific brand or client. This level is where you link to other Google Marketing Platform (GMP) tools like Campaign Manager 360 (CM360) and Google Analytics, and where you manage floodlight configurations for conversion tracking. |
| Campaign | A campaign houses a specific advertising initiative with a defined goal and budget. For example, a "Fall Product Launch 2026" campaign. |
| Insertion Order (IO) | IOs sit within a campaign and control budget, flight dates, and high-level targeting. You can have multiple IOs in a single campaign, perhaps one for video and another for display. |
| Line Item | This is the most granular level. A line item specifies the detailed targeting, bidding strategy, and creatives for a specific part of an IO. It's where the actual ad buying happens. |
The Five Integrated Modules
DV360's interface is built around five core modules, each serving a distinct function in the campaign lifecycle:
| Module | Description |
|---|---|
| Campaigns | This is the central hub for creating, managing, and monitoring all your campaigns, IOs, and line items. |
| Audiences | Here, you build and manage audience segments. You can use first-party data, Google's audience data, and third-party data sources to create highly specific targeting lists. |
| Creatives | This module is where you upload, manage, and build ad creatives. It integrates with tools like Google Web Designer and Ad Canvas. |
| Inventory | This section allows you to discover and manage ad inventory. You can browse marketplaces, negotiate deals with publishers, and set brand safety controls. |
| Insights | After your campaigns run, this module provides reporting and analytics. You can generate standard reports, build custom dashboards, and analyze performance data. |
Due to these modules, you can keep track of your marketing investments, manage media campaigns, and test out new creatives.
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Google Ads vs. DV360
| Google Ads | DV360 (Display & Video 360) | |
|---|---|---|
| Ad Inventory | Mainly Google's own network, including Search, YouTube, Google Display Network, etc. | Access to Google's inventory plus other premium inventory across multiple ad exchanges |
| Targeting Capabilities | Broad targeting options, including keywords, demographics, interest-based targeting, and remarketing | Advanced targeting capabilities, including remarketing, contextual targeting, and audience segmentation |
| Ad Formats | Search, display, video, shopping, and app ads | Display, video, audio, native, and digital-out-of-home ads |
| Buying Model | Primarily cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-mille (CPM) | Real-time bidding (RTB), programmatic guaranteed, and private marketplace deals |
| Control and Transparency | Less control over placements than DV360. Google says its "Where ads showed" report is not an exhaustive list of placements. | Control over ad placements and increased transparency |
| Campaign Management | Suited for smaller to medium campaigns | Built for managing large-scale campaigns |
| Integration and Collaboration | Links to Google Analytics 4 and other Google products. | Integration with other Google Marketing Platform tools, and collaborative features for large teams |
| Advanced Analytics | Basic campaign analytics and reporting. | Analytics, measurement capabilities, and reporting options |
| Cost | Lower barrier to entry | Higher minimum spend requirements, but potential for greater ROI |
Versatility
Google Analytics 360 and Search Ads 360 can pass data through to DV360. That means you can target audiences more precisely using the behavioral data gathered from your website and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Unlike Google Ads, DV360 provides more detailed audience customization. Instead of basic targeting based on interests, demographic insights, and keywords, marketers get access to in-market audience targeting, affinity audience targeting, geography targeting, and more.
Creatives
The platform allows you to create interactive display ads of different sizes and styles.
Google Ads allows ads to be created featuring a single image, company logo, and text with a maximum of 140 characters. The platform adjusts your creatives automatically depending on the size, placement, and device that displays your ad.
Display and Video 360 offers more media formats and templates through its Rich Media Gallery.
At the same time, Campaign Manager analytics allow for faster and more precise A/B testing of creatives and provide rich reporting opportunities with a long list of metrics.
Audiences
Audience targeting is one of the main differences when comparing Google Ads to DV360. With Google Ads, marketers can use a handful of different methods, ranging from keyword targeting to analytics remarketing lists (collected by linking your Google Analytics and Ads accounts).
DV360, in its turn, relies heavily on Floodlight pixels.
Floodlight is the conversion tracking system for Google Marketing Platform. It tracks activity on your site and collects data about conversions. It uses a cookie to track repeat visits from a specific browser.
Marketers can use mixed insights from Floodlight pixels and audience lists to track conversions more precisely and perform first-party targeting.
"Similar audiences" is a feature of Display and Video 360. With its help, you can reach out to prospects who share the same interests as your existing customers. Here are the two main requirements for creating a lookalike audience in DV360:
- The first-party audience list should have active users.
- The first-party audience list should have no fewer than 500 users
Using First, Second, and Third-Party Data
DV360 allows you to combine different types of data for precision targeting:
| Data type | Description |
|---|---|
| First-party data | This is your own data. It includes website visitors (via Floodlight tags or GA4), customer relationship management (CRM) lists (using Customer Match), and app users. This data represents people who have already engaged with your brand. |
| Second-party data | This is another company's first-party data that you access through a direct agreement. For example, a publisher might create a private deal that includes targeting for their specific audience segments. |
| Third-party data | This data is aggregated from sources and sold by data providers. You can buy segments based on demographics, purchase intent, interests, and lifestyle. |
Building Custom Audiences with the Audience Module
The Audience Module in DV360 is where you can combine these data sources to create sophisticated audience lists. For example, you could create a "High-Value Prospects" audience by combining:
visited your pricing page
In the last 30 days (first-party)
in-market for B2B software
Third-party
excluding existing customers
From your CRM list (first-party)
- Users who visited your pricing page in the last 30 days (first-party).
- And are in a third-party "in-market for B2B software" segment.
- But excluding existing customers from your CRM list (first-party).
You can also build lookalike audiences to find new users who behave similarly to your best customers.
The Trade Desk vs. DV360
The Trade Desk is a giant of the programmatic advertising market. As well as DV360, The Trade Desk allows marketers to advertise their brand or product to specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and many other parameters.
Talk to Sales
The only pricing route on Google's Display & Video 360 page
DV360
Reach out to us
The only pricing route on The Trade Desk's home page
The Trade Desk
Checked 27 October 2026 on Google's Display & Video 360 page and The Trade Desk's home page, neither of which lists a price.
One of the largest differences between these two platforms is the minimum monthly ad spend, and neither company publishes a price for it. Google's Display & Video 360 page lists no pricing and offers only a "Talk to Sales" link. The Trade Desk's home page lists no pricing either and says "Reach out to us to find the right solution to start using" the platform. Any minimum spend figure you see online comes from users, not from the vendors, so ask each sales team for a quote.
As for the technical side, one of DV360's main advantages is that Google's first-party data is available for free. Moving audiences from Google Analytics is a lot easier if you're using DV360 because Google allows the integration of these two platforms.
Another benefit of DV360 is its compatibility with Google Ads Data Hub. Google Ads Data Hub is a data clean room that allows marketers to aggregate data from YouTube, DV360, Google Analytics, and Campaign Manager. With its help, you can merge Google's audience data and your first-party data in a privacy-friendly way and get analysis-ready, user-level insights.
Bidding Strategies and Inventory Access Explained
DV360 provides a range of options for how you bid on and purchase media.
Automated Bidding vs. Manual Bidding
DV360 offers automated bidding algorithms that use machine learning to optimize bids in real time. These strategies can optimize towards goals like:
| Goal | Description |
|---|---|
| Maximize Conversions | Aims to get the most conversions for your budget. |
| Target CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition) | Bids to achieve a specific cost for each conversion. |
| Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) | Bids to achieve a target return on your ad spend. |
| Maximize Clicks or Views | Focuses on driving traffic or video views. |
While automated bidding is effective, manual bidding (setting a fixed cost per mille, CPM) is still useful. It provides control and is often used for awareness campaigns where the primary goal is to deliver a set number of impressions to a specific audience.
Programmatic Guaranteed, PMPs, and the Open Auction
DV360 provides access to inventory through different types of deals:
open auction
For scale
Private marketplace (PMP)
For quality inventory
Programmatic guaranteed (PG)
For high-impact placements
| Deal type | Description |
|---|---|
| Open auction | This is the real-time bidding marketplace where inventory from thousands of publishers is available to all buyers. It offers scale but can be less predictable. |
| Private marketplace (PMP) | A PMP is an invitation-only auction where a publisher makes their inventory available to a select group of advertisers. |
| Programmatic guaranteed (PG) | This is the programmatic version of a traditional direct buy. You negotiate a fixed price and a guaranteed number of impressions directly with a publisher. The deal is then executed programmatically through DV360, providing automation and efficiency. |
A balanced media plan often uses a combination of all three. The open auction for scale, PMPs for quality inventory, and PG for high-impact placements.
What's Next? Set up and Optimize DV360 Campaigns
The second part of our guide covers the best strategies to launch successful DV360 campaigns. In it, our featured expert, Jean-Benoît Nonone, a programmatic advertising and digital marketing expert, shared his experience with line item optimization.
Keeping Track of DV360 Campaign Performance
DV360 surely has in-app analytics features that allow tracking campaign performance right in the platform's user interface (UI). While in-app analytics do provide essential insights for monitoring user engagement and understanding user behavior, this data presents a limited scope for real-time optimization.
DV360's in-app analytics primarily focuses on DV360's own media and the conversions tracked with Floodlight. Interactions Floodlight does not record, such as CRM activity, have to be uploaded or joined outside DV360 before attribution can credit them.
The Limitations of Native DV360 Reporting
DV360's built-in reporting is useful for analyzing campaign-specific metrics. You can see impressions, clicks, viewability, and conversions tracked by Floodlight tags. However, it operates in a silo. This creates several challenges:
- Pulls data From 1,400+ data sources
- Prepares it For analysis
- Loads it To a business intelligence (BI) or visualization tool
- Assists Insights discovery
| Challenge | Description |
|---|---|
| Fragmented customer journey | DV360 sees its own media and the Floodlight conversions shared across Google Marketing Platform. |
| Incomplete ROI calculation | To calculate true ROAS, you need to connect ad spend data from DV360 with revenue data from your CRM or e-commerce platform. DV360 reports revenue for conversions tracked with Floodlight, so revenue that lives in a CRM has to be uploaded to Floodlight or joined outside DV360. |
| Manual data aggregation | To get a complete view, teams often resort to downloading comma-separated values (CSV) files from DV360 and manually combining them with data from other platforms in spreadsheets. |
An alternative, in this case, is to bring together data from sources for comprehensive analysis manually or utilize an advanced marketing solution like Improvado. The platform pulls data from 1,400+ data sources, prepares it for analysis, loads it to a business intelligence (BI) or visualization tool, and assists with insights discovery.
It comes with numerous dashboard templates you can use to visualize your data.
Some noticeable features of Improvado:
- Marketing attribution modeling: Improvado can help you connect marketing, sales, and finance data to identify touchpoints that drive revenue. You can switch between different attribution models or request a custom model that will meet the unique needs of your company.
- Professional Services: Improvado's team of analytics experts can customize your dashboard or create any custom metrics and connectors on demand.
- Managed data warehouse: The team can create and manage a BigQuery-based data warehouse to keep all of your historical data.
If you’re ready to get a full end-to-end view of your DV360 performance, Get your demo to see how Improvado can support your programmatic analytics strategy.
