Russia’s largest search engine, Yandex, has struck a real-time bidding (RTB) partnership with Google, granting its ad clients access to Google’s DoubleClick AdExchange.
The deal will see Google’s demand-side platform DoubleClick Bid Manager connect to Yandex’s real-time bidding system, and Yandex’ demand-side platform AWAPS connect to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.
This partnership will result in a larger number of bidders, which is expected to boost revenue for the most sought-after advertising spaces, Yandex said in a statement.
Yandex, which is ahead of Google in Russia with a market share of over 60 percent, said technical integration is expected to take several months.
Yandex said the agreement applied only to display advertising and did not cover “text-based contextual advertising”.
Nikolay Danilov, head of sales technologies at Yandex, said: “The integration of the two advertising systems will undoubtedly stimulate the online advertising market. The transparency that is characteristic of RTB systems created new possibilities for growth. The more players, the wider range of ad inventory, the greater the competition for placement, and the higher the quality of the ads themselves. We anticipate that the partnership with Google will result in increased display advertising sales and improvements in ad quality.”
Frank Einecke, head of SEEMEA Media Buying Solutions at DoubleClick, added: “We are happy about this partnership that will help to develop the RTB ecosystem in Russia. Given the adoption speed of RTB in this market, accessing local and global qualified inventory is key to our publishers and advertisers who are looking for incremental reach.
“We are very excited to see the Russian market moving towards innovative programmatic solutions that can serve both branding and performance strategies in reaching their targets in a more efficient way.”
In January, Yandex signed an agreement with Facebook for access to content from some of the social networking site’s users in a move to further improve its search results.