Deals

As the selling party, you can use the Price Discovery and Provisioning (PDP) API to create agreements for inventory delivery, known as deals. With the Deals endpoint, you define terms such as pricing, availability, inventory composition, bidding permissions, and custom requirements, then send the proposal to a buying party. As the deal owner, you manage the full deal life cycle—from creation to completion or cancellation—while The Trade Desk provides transparency through real-time performance insights.

Here's what you need to know about deals:

• All electronic deals on The Trade Desk platform are between you and a buying party. For details, see Deal participants.
• Each deal must accurately describe your inventory to increase its attractiveness to advertisers.
• Commitment deals are most highly valued by advertisers and therefore prioritized for full delivery, while endeavor deals offer streamlined access to specific inventory at an agreed price.
• The Trade Desk monitors quality and delivery against the agreement conditions.

The following sections explain the different deal types and participants.

Commitment deal

A commitment deal is an agreement in the platform that specifies a target cost for media investment and a timeframe for its delivery. The Trade Desk platform ensures that the participating parties can fulfill the designated investment amount and provides tools for measurement and accountability.

Here's what you need to know about commitment deals:

• To identify the bid as part of a commitment, The Trade Desk includes the deal ID in the extension object.
• Commitment deal terms must include a minimum win rate, minimum avails per day, and a floor price.
• Commitment deals can include expansion terms, which provide access to additional biddable inventory and help increase spending toward commitment goals. Commitment deals become eligible for expansion when pacing constantly falls below the agreed expansion threshold. For details, see Manage commitment deal performance.
• Commitment deals must have defined cancellation terms. These terms allow parties to cancel the deal when pacing constantly falls below the cancellation threshold.
• Commitment deals can account for spend delivered through Contributing deals—endeavor deals without media spend goals.

Endeavor deal

An endeavor deal is an agreement that grants a buying party access to inventory from one or more publishers. Endeavor deals are similar to commitments in terms of available terms, except for the following differences:

• Unlike commitments, endeavor deals aren't strongly enforced.
• Endeavor deals have several optional parameters making them a more flexible alternative to commitments.
• Endeavor deals with no media spend goal can contribute their spend toward another deal's media spend goal—either a commitment deal or another endeavor deal with a media spend goal. For details, see Contributing deals.

Deal type differences

The PDP API processes deals differently based on the type and goals, broken into three groups, commitment deals, endeavor deals with spend goals, and endeavor deals without spend goals. The following table summarizes how differences between each group of deal, in terms of enforcement and capabilities.

For details specific to creation, see Deal creation differences.

Deal participant responsibilities

The following diagram of the deal creation process outlines what you're responsible for as the selling party, as well as the responsibilities of the buying party, and The Trade Desk.

The following sections details the expectations for each party involved in a deal.

Buying party

The buying party does the following in the platform:

• Accept or reject deals, and communicate with the selling party to modify the deal terms.
• Manage deals in-flight. For details, see Deal phases and statuses.

The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk does the following through the PDP API or Deal Desk:

• Provide deal quality scores to help brands make data-driven decisions.
• Examine deal avails, signal completeness, and monitor delivery metrics when applicable.
• Offer reporting tools to track commitments and pacing, helping all deal participants stay on track with their goals.

Selling party

As the selling party, you're expected to do the following:

• Send deals to a buying party by querying the Provisioning endpoint to retrieve agency or advertiser known agent objects.
• Include supply and inventory terms, along with expected content or financial goals, in deal drafts.
• Host a clearly defined ads.txt file deployed on your site.
• Manage deals in the negotiation phase.

IMPORTANT: Inventory suppliers must have a clearly defined ads.txt file deployed on their site. See also Inventory policies.

Benefits

Deals offer several key benefits that improve efficiency, accuracy, and performance when managing agreements with multiple buying parties:

• Improves deal quality: Ensures precise deal selection through clear inventory identification.
• Supports better decision-making: Helps identify better alternatives and recommendations for platform operators.
• Enhances performance analysis: Enables better tracking and analysis of deal performance through accurate deal metadata.
• Lowers operational costs: Reduces errors associated with poorly devised deals and time-consuming troubleshooting.
• Eliminates redundant deals: Avoids duplication of inventory already available through the open market or always-on deals.
• Increases efficiency of advertising investments: Facilitates optimizing advertising investments through clear and structured inventory description.
• Helps scale programmatic investments: Drives scale for major programmatic and upfront commitments through high-performing and more accurate deals.