We’ve recently talked about how our platform offers an extensive set of features to let digital publishers run their ad operations seamlessly. Rather than looking for a developer team, with our platform, publishers can implement changes with a few clicks.
Want to run sticky ads, you can. Lazy loading? Done. Disable certain bidders from competing for ad requests from the EU (because of GDPR), you can do it with a push of a few buttons.
But we understand that we can’t possibly offer everything out of the box. Occasionally, we tend to come across new requirements from our publishing partners and if needs be, we develop and include it as a feature.
If you are a long-time user of Google Ad Manager (DFP) product, you can certainly notice how Google improved it over the years. Google ended up introducing a handful of useful features and in fact, developed adjacent products as well.
Google Ad Manager in 2010.
So, as you have guessed, in this post, we are going to discuss some of the new releases. Let’s try to focus on a theme — ‘Brand Safety’. 2020 led both publishers and advertisers to actively pull brand safety levers in their respective dashboards.
Media buyers have been trying to exclude COVID-19/BLM related keywords and categories from their campaigns and on the other hand, publishers are working to ensure the users aren’t seeing scam ads and malware.
“Since mid-March, the average number of overall malware incidents identified by The Media Trust in 24 hours is up an average of 22%, sometimes peaking at a 35% increase. Since January, malware has steadily increased with a significant number of blocked ads with fake software installs, forced or mobile redirects and brand fraud or hijacking. Instances of these ads are up over 200%.”
– Digiday.
We have shipped a few features that saves time and money for publishers. Let’s take a look at them.
Blocking Pages:
Advertisers don’t want to display ads on every page on your website and you probably want to keep some pages without any ads as well. For example, about us page and non-brand safety content pages can be excluded to help both — advertisers and publishers.
So, we let publishers to block pages based on:
- URLs. You can directly enter the page URL to block ads from that particular page. This can help you prevent showing ads on pages that don’t comply with Advertising Policies from Google or other SSPs.
- Keywords. You can’t get (or enter) the URLs of all the pages you don’t want to send ad requests from. Especially, if you are a publisher that hosts thousands of pages. In such cases, you can enter the keywords that are likely to be in the URLs. That’ll do the job.
Both of the above can be used to stop sending ad requests to selected or all SSPs (header bidding partners/AdX), depending on the platform policies.
*Available for all the publishers via Account Manager.
Ensuring Brand Safety:
You don’t want to show ads from your competitors/low-quality advertisers. Sometimes, you may want to prevent ads from a specific category altogether.
Our Brand Safety feature enables publishers to block advertiser URLs or specific IAB categories to prevent rendering unwanted ads on the page. No need to go through every SSP dashboards and block advertisers/categories individually.
*Available for all the publishers via the reporting dashboard.
Leveraging Specialized Vendors:
We have partnered with specialized vendors to help our publishers detect and block IVT/malware ads before it hits their sites. In case if a publisher wants to leverage our partnership, we can enable/disable such vendors with a click.
The best part is, publishers can test/take a vendor live only across certain geographies/devices/etc. and track the performance.
*Available for all the publishers via Account Manager.
All of them work together to help our publishers stay compliant with the SSP policies and deliver a better user experience.
