How does Ad Manager work?
Ad Manager helps you to define and sell advertising opportunities on your site.
Defining your site's inventory (defining advertising opportunities)
Imagine printing a hard copy of your home page and cutting out all of the ads. Each empty space is an opportunity to advertise. Ad Manager defines each space as an ad slot, which includes a name, description, and ad dimensions.
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| Each empty space in the page above represents an ad slot. |
An ad slot defined within Ad Manager doesn't do anything until you link it with your site using an ad tag. When a user views a page on your site, the ad tag, which is just a snippet of JavaScript, makes a call to Ad Manager and fetches an ad for display within the ad slot.
Your site might include hundreds or even thousands of ad slots. It would prove tedious, to say the least, to have to sell individual ad slots to advertisers, so the next step is to group logically associated ad slots into placements. A placement is a group of related ad slots that might interest advertisers.
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| Each bucket represents a placement; the first related to sports and the second defined by ad size. |
Imagine your site is structured like a traditional newspaper with sections for sports, finance, and weather.
- Sports placement: You might define a placement that includes all ad slots from your sports section, a placement that would likely interest an advertiser promoting athletic shoes, for example.
- Banner placement: You might also choose to define a placement that associates all 728x90 banner ad slots on your site. A different advertiser might wish to promote a new soda and would find a run- of-site banner placement ideal for their needs.
You may choose to organize your placements anyway you wish, but your choice should reflect how you intend to sell your inventory. Different ways to organize placements include:
- All ad slots on your site (ROS or Run of Site)
- A single ad slot that appears as a banner on your homepage
- All skyscraper ad slots across your entire site
- All skyscraper ad slots across your sports section
- All ad slots in the sports section of your site
The table below provides a simple example of how you might structure your inventory:
Selling your site's inventoryOnce defined, you may start selling parts of your inventory by creating an order, an agreement between you and an advertiser that includes an invoice number (optional), start and end dates, and contact information.
Each order includes one or more line items. A line item specifies the advertiser's commitment to purchase a specific number of impressions (CPM), clicks (CPC), or time (CPD) on certain dates at a certain price. Each line item also includes where an advertiser's ads will appear and, optionally, when (during the week) and to whom an ad will get displayed.
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| This order includes two line items. Each line item defines inventory (placements), |
Imagine that you maintain a site structured like a traditional newspaper, with sections for business, news, weather, and sports. Suppose a bank wants to advertise on your site in order to promote a new savings account offer as well as home loans. An order with this advertiser might include two line items:
With an order signed, the last step is to go into a line item and upload the advertiser's creatives (ads) to Ad Manager so that they'll get called when a user views your site's pages. In other words, you should upload one (or more) creative per line item unique to an ad campaign.
For example, in the scenario above, in which a bank wants to purchase your inventory for their saving account and home loan advertising campaigns, you would likely upload 728x90, 160x600, and 300x250 savings account creatives to line item 1 (GBank Savings Account - ROS), since the line item is targeting multiple placements that contain ad slots of these sizes.