How to Setup Google DFP for Selling Ads

Consider the following scenarios:

· You use an advertising network like Google AdSense for serving ads on your website but would also like to accept ad campaigns from brands, digital agencies and other direct advertisers.

· You have partnered with multiple CPM based ad networks – say AdSense, BuySellAds, TribalFusion, etc. – but would only like to run ads from the network that pays you the most money (or maximum CPM)

· You would like to display ads based on certain criteria. For instance, visitors from U.S. are shown one set of ads while visitors who are in India and use Windows are targeted with a different set of ads.

· You are using AdSense across your website and the CPMs may vary. Instead of serving low-cost Google AdSense ads, say when the CPM is less than $1, you would like to display in-house ads that promote your older article or your other website.

Google DFP, or DoubleClick for Publishers, is a perfect solution in either of the above scenarios. DFP is a free ad server from Google that lets you sell ad space on your website more effectively and also helps maximize your advertising revenue.

With DFP, you may run standard banner ads, text ads (JavaScript based) or even rich-media campaigns that use video and Flash creatives. The tool, which was formerly known as Google Ad Manager, requires no downloads or installation and any website publisher can sign-up for the DFP program as long as they have an active Google AdSense account.

Sell Your Advertising Space with Google DFP

Say you have a blog where you cover a variety of topics including technology, sports and entertainment. An advertiser wants to serve banner ad campaigns on all your tech related pages. As part of the deal, he has agreed to pay $20 CPM for all US impressions and you can fill your remnant inventory through Google AdSense ads.

Let’s see how we can easily setup such an ad campaign through Google DFP.

Step 1: Create Ad Units

We need to tell DFP about all the advertising spaces on our web pages. For this example, we’ll create three ad units – the 300×250 rectangle, the 160×600 skyscraper and the 468×60 banner. These are standard IAB units though you can define custom ad sizes as well.

Go to DFP –> Inventory –> Ad Units –> New Ad Unit (choose Web or Mobile). Give your ad unit a descriptive name so that you can easily determine where that ad unit will be displayed and also include the size of that unit. You may check the option “Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense” in case you wish to display Google Ads when there are no direct ads or when Google is offering better CPM than the direct advertiser.

Bonus Tip: If you set the target windows in the Ad Unit as “_blank”, the ads will open in a new window. Google doesn't allow you to open AdSense ads in a new window but if you are using DFP, AdSense ads can be configured to open in a new window without breaking the AdSense program policies.

Step 2: Define Placements

You have multiple ad units on the website and there’s a possibility that an advertiser may want to target one or more of these ad units. For instance, an advertiser may want to target your Medium Rectangle and Skyscraper ad units on tech-related pages of the site. You can group these ad units into a placement that can be targeted by advertisers.

Go to the Inventory tab –> Placements –> New Placement and add your placement. To keep things simple, we will associate only one ad unit (300×250) with our ad placement. Check the option that says “Offer this placement to advertisers” through AdWords to attract more advertisers. You should carefully fill the AdSense targeting section for that placement since whatever you write here will be viewable by AdWords advertisers.

Step 3. Create an Order

Now that we have defined our ad inventory, it’s time to create the client’s order (or campaign). The client /advertiser will specify where he wants to place the ad, what kind of demographics he wants to target, what’s the price he is willing to pay and how long will the campaign run on the website.

Go to DFP –> Orders –> New Order. Create a company for the advertiser and then fill-in the order details under “New Line Item.” Set the Type to “Price Priority” if you want the highest paying ads to be served on your site. Set Value CPM equal to the price that the client will pay and then add the targeting criteria.

Step 4. Upload the Ad Creative

Next you have to upload the ad creative that will display on your web pages. You can either upload images, Flash videos or even snippets of HTML and JavaScript in case you’re going with text ads.

Go to DFP – > Line Items and select the “Line Item” that you've created in the previous step. Click Add Creatives and either upload the image / SWF Flash file or choose the Text Ad format to enter a text-on ad (like the one you see on Google search pages).

You can even upload multiple creative ads per line item and they’ll display evenly across the site – you can compare the click-through rates of these creatives to determine the ad copy that performs best with your visitors.

Step 5. Get the Ad Tags for your Site

We’ll grab the JavaScript code from Google Ad Manager DFP and copy-paste it into our website /blog template.

Click the Inventory tab in your DFP dashboard and choose “Generate Tags” – select the appropriate ad unit (the one you created in Step #1) and choose “Generate Tags.” Use the Google Publisher Tag (asynchronous) option from the drop-down and add this code to your website. Google DFP should begin serving ads on your pages in the next 10-15 minutes.

If you ever have trouble serving ads through DFP , just open any page of your website, add ?google_debug to the URL and reload. This will generate a tracing log that should help you debug the problem, if any.

If you are generating revenue off your website or blog, chances are you serve banner ads and they are either updated manually by adding the images and URLs into the source codes or with the help of external ad-serving scripts like OpenX or OIO Publishers.

Google has a similar web service, call the Google Ad Manager. In a nutshell, it is a simple (and free) web service that helps you manage banner ads. It also comes with a pretty complete inventory report module. Ad Manager integrates with AdSense, therefore webmasters have the ability to serve AdSense ads if there’s no banner for any particular slot. Here’s a quick look into advantages of Google Ad Manager:

§ Ad Targeting ability. You control who get to see the ads. Let it be geographical, browser or language specific.

§ Efficient ad serving. No script installation is required. Everything (including the creatives) are hosted with Google. Not only it saves you space and bandwidths, you can also be rest-assured that banners will be delivered quickly.

§ Multi-user supported. You can assign multiple salespersons to handle the sales part, and have everything documented/recorded nicely inside Google Ad Manager.

§ Simple User Interface. And like any other Google web services, Ad Manager has simple and easy to understand interface.

If you are convinced that Google Ad Manager is potentially helpful in managing advertisements for your website or blog, we want to show you how to get it setup right from the scratch.

1. Create Ad Slots

Ad Slots are the reserved space on your site for ad placements. If you want to insert 4 125×125 banners on your sidebr, you are looking at creating 4 ad slots. We have eight 125×125 image banners. That means we’ll need to repeatedly create 8 different ad slots. Let’s go about doing it.

2. Compulsory fields: Give your slot a unique Ad slot name. Select the banner size from drop down, or create one if you like. Choose if the banner should open a new window (_blank) or open on current window (_top) upon click.

3. Optional fields: Checked the AdSense checkbox is you want to maximize revenue on the slot with AdSense, but we’ll recommend not to, for now. Fill in a meaningful description for the Ad Slot, or you can perhaps skip this if your Ad slot name is self-descriptive enough.

4. Save it.

Repeat step 1, 2 and 3 to create all the ad slots you’ll need. For our case, we will be creating 8 ad slots with different name. Here’s how one of them look like.

And once you are done with creating all your ad slots, here’s how your Inventory page will look like. Next, we will be creating ad placements.

2. Create Ad Placements

Ad Placements are what hold/group your ad slots together. since we have 8 ad slots of 125×125 banners on the sidebar, we’ll need one ad placement to hold them together. Ad placement also makes sure each ad gets a fair shot of being on the top position if you set them on rotational. Here’s how you create ad placement.

1. Under Inventory -> Placements, click on New Placement.

2. Compulsory fields: Give your ad placement a meaningful name. For example, we name ours "HKC-125-RightTop-Zone" because it’s going to store all 125×125 banners, positioned at the top right corner of the blog.

3. Optional fields: If you allow AdSense to bid for ad slots in this placement, check forTargeting, else uncheck. The Internal Description is personal use only, something to let you understand your ad placements better.

4. Add all ad slots that belongs to this new ad placement you’ve created, in our case we added all.

5. Save it.

Here’s a sample of how our Ad Placement settings look like.

Here’s a quick summary – You’ve created the necessary Ad Slots, and group them under a Ad Placement. The next thing we need to do is to add "real" banners into each of these ad slots.

3. Create Orders

Orders

Think of Orders as banner order requests. It stores information about who the advertisers are, the start and end date of the ad campaigns, and more. If an advertise place an order of banner ad on your website, you create a new Order. If you have 8 Ad Slots, expect to create up to 8 different Orders. Make sense? Let’s create some Orders.

1. Under Orders, click on New Order.

2. Compulsory fields: Give each other an Order name and External ID you can easily regconized. Let the system know when the banner will start and when it’ll end by choosing theStart date and End date. Choose unlimited if it’s likely to be permanent.

3. Optional fields: You might also want to fill up the Advertiser, Agency, Contacts, User Assignments and Notes to help you understand the Order better.

4. Save it.

We’ll now create a Line item for this order.

Line Items

Line Items associate with Orders. Every time an Order is entered, you’ll need to create a Line Item for it. Line item allows you to determine the nature of the ad, whether it’s serving as CPC, CPM or CPD.You also set the cost/price for the ad here.

Everytime you hit the Save button after creating an Order, you’ll be directed to create a Line item.

2. Give it a Name.

3. Determine the Delivery Priority. If your order is a direct ad, change to Exclusive from the drop down box so you can use CPD (Cost per Day).

4. Again, you need to make sure you’ve correctly entered the Start date and End date.

5. Under Placement section, associate Line Item with it’s respective placement.

6. Targetting section allows you to control who should see the ad. In another words, under what condition the ad will appear on your website. This setting is optional, by default ad will be visible to all.

7. Delivery Options section detemine the appearance of the ad. Set Delivery rate and Creative rotation to Even will ensure all your orders get equal impressions.

8. Save it.

A quick recap before we continue. We've created an Order, with advertiser information, campaign start date and end date. Then we created Line Item for the Order where it stores information like cost type (CPC, CPM, CPD), cost, targeting behaviors, etc. The next thing we need to do is to addcreative for the ad.

Creatives

Creatives are images of the ads. Every time a Line Item is added, you’ll need to add (and approve) at least one creative for it.

1. After saving a Line item, click on need creatives to add an image for the ad.

2. Fill up the Name, Ad slot size (banner size), Creative type, Manual Weight (if you need to control the priority of banner rotations)

3. Save it.

Creative type determines how you serve the banner image. Google Ad Manager is capable of hosting your banners internally (regardlessly of jpg, flash, gif or png) or you can host them elsewhere and insert the image URL. Use rich media if you need manual HTML codes insertion.

Here’s a sample of how creative upload page should be filled.

Remember to Approve and activate the creative.

Repeat all steps in Orders, Line Items and Creatives for every individual banners. In our case, we will repeat this 8 times to fill up all our ad slots.

4. Display Banners

Here’s our final step before ads start showing on our website – generate the codes and paste them inside our source codes.

1. Go to Inventory -> Ad Slots, click on Generate Sample HTML.

2. Add all slots needed to Selected Items section

Scroll to the bottom to find your generated codes. It should look something like this:

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

1. <html>

2. <head>

3.

4. <script type="text/javascript" src="http://partner.googleadservices.com/gampad/google_service.js

5. </script>

6. <script type="text/javascript">

7. GS_googleAddAdSenseService("ca-pub-8918970543424762");

8. GS_googleEnableAllServices();

9. </script>

10. <script type="text/javascript">

11. GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A1");

12. GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A2");

13. GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A3");

14. GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A4");

15. GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A5");

16. GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A6");

17. GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A7");

18. GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A8");

19. </script>

20. <script type="text/javascript">

21. GA_googleFetchAds();

22. </script>

23.

24. </head>

25. <body>

26. Sample Text before slot HKC-125A1

27.

28. <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A1

29. -->

30. <script type="text/javascript">

31. GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A1");

32. </script>

33. <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A1

34. -->

35. Sample Text before slot HKC-125A2

36.

37. <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A2

38. -->

39. <script type="text/javascript">

40. GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A2");

41. </script>

42. <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A2

43. -->

44. Sample Text before slot HKC-125A3

45.

46. <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A3

47. -->

48. <script type="text/javascript">

49. GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A3");

50. </script>

51. <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A3

52. -->

53. Sample Text before slot HKC-125A4

54.

55. <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A4

56. -->

57. <script type="text/javascript">

58. GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A4");

59. </script>

60. <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A4

61. -->

62. Sample Text before slot HKC-125A5

63.

64. <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A5

65. -->

66. <script type="text/javascript">

67. GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A5");

68. </script>

69. <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A5

70. -->

71. Sample Text before slot HKC-125A6

72.

73. <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A6

74. -->

75. <script type="text/javascript">

76. GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A6");

77. </script>

78. <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A6

79. -->

80. Sample Text before slot HKC-125A7

81.

82. <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A7

83. -->

84. <script type="text/javascript">

85. GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A7");

86. </script>

87. <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A7

88. -->

89. Sample Text before slot HKC-125A8

90.

91. <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A8

92. -->

93. <script type="text/javascript">

94. GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A8");

95. </script>

96. <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A8

97. -->

98. </body>

99. </html>

Follow the instructions stated in comments to insert the codes into their respective <head> and<body> sections.

Note: To prevent errors and avoid messing up the live site, it’s good that you copy the generated codes, paste it on a blank HTML to test the output. If the ads do not show up, chances are your current time is not yet the start date set in Orders and Line Items.

It’s done! You are now managing your website banners with Google Ad Manager. Login again few days later to check on the performance.

OnlineOperations

Monday 19 August 2013