DV360 on Your Own Seat, Bid Against Real Outcomes

Every DV360 account we run is billed to a seat in the advertiser's name. You sign the Google Marketing Platform order, you own the Floodlight configuration and the Ads Data Hub project, and we hold user-level access you can revoke in an afternoon. That single arrangement removes the rebate, the undisclosed markup and any argument about who keeps four years of conversion history when the engagement ends. Our fee is one line on one invoice. The first four weeks: Floodlight gets audited before a line item is touched. Most accounts we inherit are counting the same event twice, once through the global tag and once through a duplicate in Tag Manager, and reporting a conversion rate nobody has questioned in a year. Click and view windows get set explicitly, usually thirty-day click and one-day view, and view-through is reported in its own column. It is never added into a return figure. Trafficking is rebuilt through structured data files rather than the interface. The account then lives as SDF in a git repository: targeting, pacing and frequency arrive as a reviewed diff instead of a click nobody can trace. When a thirty thousand euro insertion order spends sixty percent of its budget in four days, the commit history says who changed the pacing and when. Custom bidding: A platform conversion is a proxy. In staffing a form submit is not a candidate, and in freight a quote request is not a booking. We write the custom bidding script in Ads Data Hub against the outcome recorded in your own system — an application that reached recruiter screen, a quote that cleared credit check — and let the algorithm optimise to the graded score instead of the proxy. Below roughly fifty qualified events a week there is not enough signal to train on. We say so and bid to a hand-weighted score rather than sell you a model fitting noise. Supply: The inventory list is cut to deals plus a short open-exchange tail, checked against sellers.json and each publisher's ads.txt. Pre-bid brand safety sits at partner level so it cannot be switched off inside one line item by somebody in a hurry on a Friday. Employment campaigns: Recruitment advertising into the United States and Canada runs under Google's special ad category rules, which strip postcode, age and gender targeting. We build those campaigns contextually from day one rather than discovering the restriction in launch week, and we keep the EU and North American structures separate so a bulk edit cannot cross-contaminate them. Measurement: Once a quarter we run a geo holdout — matched Irish or UK regions with the campaign switched off — and report the incremental number beside the platform number. They usually disagree, and the size of the gap is the point of the exercise. The write-up is aimed at a finance director who has never opened DV360. Not included: Search, paid social, creative production beyond dynamic feed configuration, and ad server migration. We will read your Campaign Manager 360 setup and tell you what is wrong with it. We will not rebuild your tag management. This is the wrong engagement if: Your programmatic budget sits below about twenty thousand euro a month. DV360's platform and data costs make a mid-market seat the better buy at that level and we would rather say it than take the retainer. It is also wrong if your finance team needs the agency to hold the seat, or if renewal is decided on last-click return as reported by the platform that spent the money.