Programmatic Advertising：交易、投放与卖方路径

Programmatic advertising 是指使用软件买卖数字广告库存，方式包括实时竞价，或以固定价格协商达成的交易。它描述的是交易如何发生，而不是广告出现在哪里或采用何种格式。

Advertising and Paid Media

Programmatic Advertising：交易、投放与卖方路径
- Arfadia

Programmatic advertising is the use of software to buy and sell digital ad inventory, through real-time auctions or through negotiated deals at a fixed price. It describes how a transaction happens, not where an ad appears or which format it uses.

That distinction starts to matter the moment money moves. A single programmatic purchase leaves at least three records behind: the deal that set the terms, the delivery events that decided what got billed, and the seller path that shows who was allowed to sell the impression. Each record answers a different question, and together they tell you what a campaign actually bought.

Programmatic Is a Way of Transacting, Not a Channel or an Auction

The most common misreading treats programmatic as a synonym for real-time bidding. It is broader than that. Google Ad Manager's documentation lists programmatic transactions as including Programmatic Guaranteed, Preferred Deals, Open Bidding, and Ad Exchange auctions, and it describes Programmatic Direct as a feature that automates the negotiation and sale of a publisher's direct-sold inventory (vendor documentation, VERIFIED). Auctions are one route. Negotiated, fixed-price agreements are another.

Programmatic is also not an ad format. Display, video, and connected TV inventory can each be bought programmatically or through a manual insertion order. The label says how the parties transacted, nothing about creative or placement quality.

For a sense of scale, the IAB and PwC put US programmatic advertising revenue at $162.4 billion for full-year 2025, up 20.5% from 2024 (REPORTED: industry association revenue report prepared with PwC, United States only). It is a single-market revenue figure, not a global market size.

Who Does What in the Stack

A demand-side platform (DSP) works for the buyer, a supply-side platform (SSP) works for the seller, and an exchange connects them; the OpenRTB implementation guide describes the exchange selecting a winning bid and notifying that bidder (technical standard, VERIFIED for the exchange role; DSP and SSP roles REPORTED). Commercial products often bundle these roles. The auction sequence is covered in the Real-time Bidding (RTB) entry, and marketplace mechanics in the Ad Exchange entry.

Four Ways to Buy Programmatically

How the four programmatic transaction types in Google Ad Manager differ on buyer access, inventory reservation, pricing and delivery commitment, using Google's labels, which other platforms may name differently.

Buying method	Who can buy	Inventory reserved?	How the price is set	Delivery commitment	Source / label
Open auction	Any eligible buyer can bid on an impression	No	Auction	Non-guaranteed, non-reserved transaction	Google Ad Manager Help (vendor documentation, VERIFIED)
Private auction (grouped as private marketplace, PMP, in industry benchmarks)	Only invited buyers can bid	No	Auction	Non-guaranteed, non-reserved transaction	Google Ad Manager Help (vendor documentation, VERIFIED); PMP label per ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark (REPORTED)
Preferred deal	The buyer gets a first, or "preferred," opportunity to bid at the negotiated price when an ad request arrives	No; the seller can still reserve that inventory for another buyer	Negotiated in advance, fixed	Buyer is not obliged to buy; the deal secures a price and a first look, not volume	Google Ad Manager Help, "Programmatic Guaranteed vs. Preferred Deals" (vendor documentation, VERIFIED)
Programmatic Guaranteed	One buyer	Yes, reserved for that buyer	Negotiated in advance, under negotiated terms	Contractually obligated to deliver under the agreed terms; closest to a traditional direct buy, with delivery and reconciliation automated	Google Ad Manager Help, "Programmatic Guaranteed vs. Preferred Deals" (vendor documentation, VERIFIED)

Four Ways to Buy Programmatically

Google's documentation sorts programmatic transactions by two questions. Is the inventory reserved for a specific buyer? And is the price negotiated in advance or set by an auction? The labels below follow Google Ad Manager's terminology; other platforms may name similar arrangements differently.

Open and Private Auctions

In an open auction, any eligible buyer can bid on an impression. A private auction limits bidding to invited buyers. In both cases the inventory is not reserved for anyone, and Google's documentation places both under non-guaranteed, non-reserved transactions (vendor documentation, VERIFIED).

Industry benchmarks group invitation-only buying under the label private marketplace (PMP). The ANA's Q3 2025 benchmark reported that PMPs accounted for 81.6% of programmatic spend, and its Q4 2025 benchmark reported PMPs at more than 92% of median spend across environments (REPORTED: ANA participant benchmark developed with TAG TrustNet and Fiducia, geography not disclosed). The two quarters use different measures, so the gap is not a growth rate, and both describe benchmark participants only.

Preferred Deals

A preferred deal fixes a negotiated price, but it does not reserve the inventory and it does not oblige the buyer to purchase anything. Google describes the buyer as getting an initial, or "preferred," opportunity to bid at the negotiated price when an ad request arrives (vendor documentation, VERIFIED). The seller can still reserve that inventory for another buyer. A preferred deal secures a price and a first look, not volume.

Programmatic Guaranteed

Programmatic Guaranteed reserves inventory for one buyer, at a negotiated price, under negotiated terms. Google's documentation describes guaranteed campaigns as contractually obligated to deliver based on those terms, while non-guaranteed campaigns are not (vendor documentation, VERIFIED). It is the closest programmatic equivalent to a traditional direct buy, with delivery and reconciliation automated.

Deal vs. Delivery vs. Seller Path

An analysis of the three records behind every programmatic purchase, showing the question each one answers, what to check, and where its proof stops.

Record	Question it answers	What to check	What it does not prove	Label / basis
Deal	What was promised: was inventory reserved or merely offered, was the price fixed or set impression by impression, and was the buyer obliged to take delivery?	Confirm the buying method of each line item first; a team that reads a preferred deal as guaranteed volume will misread every underdelivery report	What actually ran, or what the advertising caused	Analysis, based on Google Ad Manager Help (vendor documentation, VERIFIED)
Delivery	When does a win become billable?	Which event triggers the charge; OpenRTB separates the win notice from the billing notice, and most parties treat an ad as billable on some form of delivery or rendering, not the auction win alone; buyers also use the billing notice to pace budgets and count frequency caps	That the impression was useful; the ANA counts an impression as benchmark-qualified only when it is fraud-free, measurable, viewable and not on a made-for-advertising (MFA) site	Analysis, based on IAB Tech Lab OpenRTB implementation guide (technical standard, VERIFIED) and ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark (REPORTED)
Seller path	Who was allowed to sell the impression?	ads.txt for the sellers a publisher authorizes, sellers.json for the sellers an SSP or exchange represents, and the SupplyChain object for the entities that handled the bid request	Suitability or results; an impression can arrive through a fully authorized path and still sit next to content a brand would avoid, or reach people who would have bought anyway	Analysis, based on IAB Tech Lab announcement of sellers.json and the SupplyChain object, April 11, 2019 (standards body announcement, VERIFIED)

What You Actually Bought: Deal, Delivery, and Seller Path

Every programmatic report and invoice rests on three separate records that often share one interface. Pulling them apart turns "did this campaign work?" into three questions with checkable answers.

The Deal: What Was Promised

The deal record tells you what the seller committed to. Was the inventory reserved, or merely offered? Was the price fixed or set impression by impression? Was the buyer obliged to take delivery? A team that thinks it bought guaranteed volume through a preferred deal will misread every underdelivery report. Confirm the buying method of each line item first.

Delivery: When a Win Becomes Billable

Winning an auction and paying for an impression are different events. The OpenRTB implementation guide separates the win notice, sent when a bid wins, from a billing notice, fired when the clearing price is booked as spend, and notes that most parties consider an ad billable upon some form of delivery or rendering rather than the auction win alone (technical standard, VERIFIED). Buyers also use the billing notice to pace budgets and count frequency caps. The question for any platform: which event triggers this charge?

A billable impression is still not the same as a useful one. The ANA's benchmark counts an impression as "benchmark-qualified" only when it is fraud-free, measurable, viewable, and not on a made-for-advertising (MFA) site (REPORTED: ANA participant benchmark, geography not disclosed). In its Q3 2025 release, the ANA reported MFA domains at 0.39% of programmatic spend, a share it described as down by half since Q2 (REPORTED: spend share, not impression share or share of websites). Delivery checks of this kind sit alongside invalid-traffic controls discussed in the Ad Fraud entry, and alongside viewability measurement.

Seller Path: Who Was Allowed to Sell

The third record concerns the route an impression took to reach the buyer. IAB Tech Lab released sellers.json and the OpenRTB SupplyChain object for public comment on April 11, 2019, building on the earlier ads.txt and app-ads.txt specifications to extend transparency to SSPs and exchanges (standards body announcement, VERIFIED). In practice, ads.txt lets a publisher declare which sellers are authorized to sell its inventory, sellers.json lets an SSP or exchange identify the sellers it represents, and the SupplyChain object records the entities that handled a given bid request.

These files answer an authorization question, not a suitability or results question. An impression can arrive through a fully authorized path and still sit next to content a brand would avoid, or reach people who would have bought anyway.

Targeting When Cookies Are Not the Assumption

Programmatic buying does not require third-party cookies for every transaction, but identifier use is more layered than "cookies on" or "cookies off."

Contextual and Non-Personalized Buying

Google's documentation for non-personalized ads states that these ads do not use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for ad targeting, but still use them for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and combating fraud and abuse (vendor documentation, VERIFIED, Google products only). For programmatic transactions carrying a non-personalized signal, ads served through Display & Video 360 use only contextual and placement targeting. "Non-personalized" therefore describes how an ad was selected. It does not mean no identifier was involved anywhere in the transaction.

Frequency Capping With Missing Identifiers

Display & Video 360 applies frequency caps across apps or connected TV apps when a device identifier is passed in the bid request, and it uses modeling and historical data to estimate caps when cookies or device IDs are unavailable (vendor documentation, VERIFIED, Google products only). A cap reported on modeled data is an estimate, and it should be read as one.

Browser and Regulatory Context, as of October 2026

On October 17, 2025, Google announced it would retire most Privacy Sandbox technologies, including Topics, Protected Audience, and the Attribution Reporting API, citing low adoption, while keeping CHIPS, FedCM, and Private State Tokens and maintaining Chrome's existing approach of giving users a choice about third-party cookies (company announcement, VERIFIED). In the United Kingdom, the Competition and Markets Authority released Google from its Privacy Sandbox commitments the same day (regulator decision, VERIFIED). In the United States, a September 16, 2026 Department of Justice release stated that the court in United States et al. v. Google LLC (Eastern District of Virginia) ordered integrations between Google's AdX and DFP and the open-source Prebid framework, real-time bids from AdX into competing publisher ad servers, publisher data export from DFP and AdX, and a monitor with a technical committee for six years (government statement by a party to the case, VERIFIED as the department's account). Published estimates of how much publishers lose without third-party cookies also differ from study to study, so any single figure deserves caution.

Price, Fees, and Auction Transparency

There is no universal price for programmatic advertising. Cost depends on buying method, inventory, data, and bundled services. Most media is quoted on a cost per mille (CPM) basis, but two CPMs are only comparable when both sides agree on what event is billed and which charges sit outside the quoted media price. A cheap CPM on impressions that fail delivery checks can cost more per useful impression than a higher one.

Auction rules have historically been hard for buyers to inspect. In January 2026 the Media Rating Council issued final Digital Advertising Auction Transparency Standards, setting requirements for transparency, disclosure, and reporting of digital advertising auctions, with the stated aim of promoting transparency around auction rules and scoring (industry standard, VERIFIED). Operators submit to MRC auditing voluntarily, so it is fair to ask a vendor whether it has been audited against them.

Measuring Outcomes Without Confusing Credit for Cause

Deal, delivery, and seller-path checks establish what ran and on what terms. None of them shows what the advertising caused. Marketing attribution assigns credit for conversions, which helps reporting but does not prove additional sales.

Peer-reviewed research shows why the distinction matters. Gordon, Moakler, and Zettelmeyer analyzed 663 large-scale advertising experiments at Facebook, published in Marketing Science in 2023, and concluded that state-of-the-art observational methods could not reliably recover the causal effect of the advertising, even with access to more than 5,000 user and experiment features (peer-reviewed journal, VERIFIED). The study covers one platform, not programmatic performance. Still, if rich platform data could not reproduce experimental results, an attributed return from an open-web campaign deserves equal skepticism.

Where the budget justifies it, the stronger approach is an experiment that compares exposed and held-out groups, the method behind incrementality testing. Keep that result separate from delivery reports, so a clean log is never mistaken for business impact.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between programmatic advertising and real-time bidding?

Programmatic advertising is the broader category of automated buying and selling. Real-time bidding is one auction-based way to transact within it. Programmatic also includes preferred deals and Programmatic Guaranteed, where terms are agreed before delivery.

What is the difference between a DSP and an SSP?

A DSP works for buyers, evaluating inventory and bidding for them. An SSP works for publishers, managing how inventory is offered. An exchange connects the two, and many products combine these roles.

What is the difference between a preferred deal and programmatic guaranteed?

A preferred deal sets a negotiated price but does not reserve inventory, and the buyer is not required to buy. Programmatic Guaranteed reserves inventory for one buyer at a negotiated price, and the campaign is contractually obligated to deliver under the agreed terms.

Does programmatic advertising require third-party cookies?

No. Contextual and placement targeting can select inventory without personal identifiers. In Google's systems, however, non-personalized ads still use cookies or device identifiers for frequency capping, aggregated reporting, and fraud prevention, so "no targeting cookies" is not the same as "no identifiers."

How much does programmatic advertising cost?

There is no standard price. Cost depends on the buying method, the inventory, the data and services included, and which event triggers billing. Compare quotes only after confirming what each price covers and which event is billed.

Related Terms

Real-time Bidding (RTB): one auction method within programmatic.
Ad Exchange: the marketplace linking buy and sell sides.
Cost per Mille (CPM): price per thousand impressions.
Ad Fraud: invalid traffic and deceptive inventory.
Marketing Attribution: how conversion credit is assigned.
Incrementality: the outcome caused by advertising.
Web Analytics: on-site measurement after the click.
Media Buying: the wider practice of buying ad space.
Viewability: whether a delivered ad had a chance to be seen.

Sources

Google Ad Manager Help, "Programmatic Guaranteed vs. Preferred Deals." Vendor documentation. VERIFIED. https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/7637485.
Google Ad Manager Help, "Ways of transacting in Ad Manager" and "Get started with Programmatic Direct." Vendor documentation. VERIFIED. https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9248464. https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/6239618.
IAB Tech Lab, OpenRTB 2.x implementation guide (GitHub repository). Technical standard documentation. VERIFIED. https://github.com/InteractiveAdvertisingBureau/openrtb2.x/blob/main/implementation.md.
IAB Tech Lab, announcement of sellers.json and the OpenRTB SupplyChain object, April 11, 2019. Standards body announcement. VERIFIED. https://iabtechlab.com/press-releases/iab-tech-lab-announces-two-new-technologies-to-build-more-transparency-trust-in-the-programmatic-supply-chain/.
Google Help, "Personalized and non-personalized ads," and Display & Video 360 Help, "About non-personalized ads." Vendor documentation, Google products only. VERIFIED. https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9005435. https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/9023492.
Display & Video 360 Help, "Manage frequency with frequency caps." Vendor documentation, Google products only. VERIFIED. https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/2696786.
Media Rating Council, Digital Advertising Auction Transparency Standards, final, January 2026. Industry standard. VERIFIED. https://mediaratingcouncil.org/sites/default/files/Standards/MRC_Digital_Advertising_Auction_Transparency_Standards_FINAL_0.pdf.
Google Privacy Sandbox, "Update on plans for Privacy Sandbox technologies," Anthony Chavez, October 17, 2025. Company announcement. VERIFIED. https://privacysandbox.google.com/blog/update-on-plans-for-privacy-sandbox-technologies.
UK Competition and Markets Authority, Decision to release commitments previously accepted in respect of Google's Privacy Sandbox proposals, October 17, 2025. Regulator decision, United Kingdom. VERIFIED. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69bc801b27f2139508f73d41/Decision_to_release_the_commitments_previously_accepted_by_the_CMA_in_respect_of_Google_s_Privacy_Sandbox_proposals.pdf.
US Department of Justice, "Department of Justice Again Wins Substantial Relief Against Google," September 16, 2026. Government statement by a party to the case, United States. VERIFIED as the department's account. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-again-wins-substantial-relief-against-google.
Gordon, B., Moakler, R., and Zettelmeyer, F. (2023), "Close Enough? A Large-Scale Exploration of Non-Experimental Approaches to Advertising Measurement," Marketing Science 42(4), 768 to 793. Peer-reviewed journal. VERIFIED. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2022.1413.
IAB and PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2025, April 2026. Industry association revenue report, United States only. REPORTED. https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IAB_PwC_Internet_Ad_Revenue_Report_Full_Year_2025_April_2026.pdf.
ANA, release on Q3 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark brand safety and suitability metrics, November 5, 2025. Participant benchmark with TAG TrustNet and Fiducia, geography not disclosed. REPORTED. https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/pr-2025-11-transparency.
ANA, Q4 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark release, February 25, 2026. Participant benchmark with TAG TrustNet and Fiducia, geography not disclosed. REPORTED. https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/pr-2026-02-programatic.