Display & Video 360: Features, Advantages, and Expert Insights

Updated in July 2025

Display & Video 360 is a demand-side platform (DSP) within the Google Marketing Platform ecosystem. It enables advertisers to plan, buy, optimize, and measure digital campaigns from a single interface.

Scroll down to learn what DV360 is, how it works, and where it delivers the most value, sharing practical insights from real campaign experience.

What Is DV360?

Display & Video 360 belongs to the class of demand-side platforms (DSPs) used in digital marketing. As a DSP, it enables advertisers to buy inventory from multiple publishers connected through various supply-side platforms (SSPs).

The platform brings together all core tools needed to run end-to-end marketing campaigns, including:

• creative creation and management
• campaign planning and control
• media buying across publishers
• audience data organization and activation
• campaign planning, measurement, and optimization

DV360 allows advertisers to launch multiple ad formats across different inventory sources from a single interface. This simplifies campaign management and analysis, saves time, and improves overall team efficiency.

Display & Video 360: Key Features and Capabilities

The main modules of this tool include the following:

Campaigns

One of the core strengths of Display & Video 360 is its advanced campaign management, which enables the building and execution of cross-channel media plans. Campaigns can be planned using reach and frequency forecasts based on budget and audience parameters.

To achieve performance goals without manual optimization, DV360 offers automated bidding strategies designed to maximize efficiency and scale results.

Audiences 

Another key feature of DV360 is advanced audience management. You can create an audience based on data collected from different campaigns: clicks, views, conversions, and combinations of lists for remarketing. You can also open the Audiences module to analyze audiences or generate reports, and to create individual audience segments based on customer data.

Working with audiences in DV360 offers several advantages:

• Google audience segments combined with first-party lists built via Floodlight tags for remarketing
• Third-party audience segments from external data providers, enabling more niche and intent-based targeting
• YouTube audience data that supports broader reach and cross-platform activation
• Custom audience combinations that merge first-party data with Google and third-party segments

Creatives

In DV360, creatives are based on audience data and media placement. The platform provides powerful tools that enable you to make informed decisions about creatives and immediately adapt them to the target audience. DV360 has many possibilities for creating creatives in different formats: Display, Video, Audio, and Native.

Also, the DV360 platform boasts an arsenal of auxiliary tools for creatives:

• Ad Canvas — create graphic ads with real-time previews and flexible layouts
• Format Gallery — access innovative ad formats and templates from Google Web Designer to build audience-relevant creatives
• Data-driven creative — adapt messaging for different audiences using custom rules that support your creative strategy

Inventory

The DV360 platform has high-quality inventory from trusted publishers and SSPs (supply-side publishers), as well as Google inventory. With the new capabilities of the Inventory module, media teams can view the diverse media market across formats, devices, and screens, and then easily negotiate and manage campaigns through a range of deal types.

Alongside inventory access, DV360 provides the following capabilities and resources:

• Fraud prevention and brand safety — built-in tools to protect campaigns and ensure brand safety targeting
• Advanced TV — access to premium TV inventory across streaming environments and traditional networks
• Unified media buying — the ability to purchase display, video, and audio inventory from multiple partners, including SSPs and ad exchanges, within a single interface
• YouTube inventory — full access to all TrueView formats, with the option to activate YouTube Reserve deals
• Google partner inventory — access to placements across Gmail, Waze, and other Google partner apps
• Guaranteed and programmatic deals — automated buying of direct deals with real-time audience data, combining reservation-based buying with programmatic efficiency

Insights Module

Also, the DV360 platform provides opportunities for detailed analysis, allowing access to all necessary indicators in one place. Active View, Google’s viewability measurement technology, determines in real-time whether an ad was visible to a user. This measurement protects your brand and ad budget by providing statistics that help you understand where your ads are appearing, along with details like video player size and page position.

Advantages of Display & Video 360

Working with a campaign management tool that removes the need to constantly switch between platforms is already a clear advantage. With DV360, the benefits go well beyond that:

• Full campaign control. DV360 provides clear visibility into how budgets are spent and where ads are served. Costs across open auctions and direct deals are managed from a single dashboard, giving teams full control over media investments.
• Cross-team collaboration. The platform supports collaborative workflows within one environment. Planners build media strategies, designers develop creatives, buyers launch and optimize campaigns, and analysts track performance, all with role-based access levels.
• Effective audience reach. DV360 enables scalable reach across platforms, formats, and messaging. The Audience Insights module supports audience creation, analysis, and activation, helping teams design more strategic and relevant campaigns.
• Intelligent automation. Automated bidding and optimization reduce manual effort and improve responsiveness. Powered by Google’s machine-learning capabilities, these features help teams reach campaign goals more efficiently.

What Our Experts Say

Below is our expert assessment of Display & Video 360 at MixDigital.

• Stanislav Skrypnyk, Media Director at MixDigital

“DV360 is a core top-of-funnel platform for building audience reach and brand interaction. It remains one of the most efficient programmatic tools in terms of cost per contact, supported by broad inventory access and flexible Brand Visibility controls that help drive ad recall at scale.

Looking ahead, DV360’s development is likely to focus on deeper AI-driven planning and optimization, along with stronger data integration to further improve targeting and campaign performance.”

• Vadym Slavinsky, Head of Digital Buying & Analytics at MixDigital

“Display & Video 360 offers robust functionality for reaching target audiences and building brand awareness. Based on our campaign experience, the platform is equally effective for performance goals, including driving sales, conversions, and leads.

DV360 stands out for its advanced targeting, flexible inventory buying, custom audience creation, and granular placement control. Custom Bidding algorithms further extend optimization capabilities beyond standard setups.

Campaign setup in DV360 is more complex than in Google Ads, reflecting the platform’s depth. This complexity enables greater control over targeting, inventory quality, optimization, and creative execution.”

With flexible inventory access and intelligent optimization, DV360 helps advertisers achieve measurable results at scale.