You now have the ability to manage your display banners across your marketplace using Google Ad Manager.
This provides you with all the functionality of Google Ad Manager as well as standardised add unit sizes to be in line with the rest of the industry.
To start using Google Ad Manager, you’ll need to follow these steps to enable the integration.
Configuring Google Ad Manager
Step 1: You need a valid Google AdSense account to sign-up for Ad Manager. If you don’t have a Google AdSense account already, create a new AdSense account.
Your Google AdSense account is only required to set up your Ad Manager account. You aren't required to actively use Google AdSense.
Step 2: Next, you need to create your Ad Manager account: https://admanager.google.com
Step 3: Once you have access to your account, you will need to add the Ad units that are available on the Marketplacer platform. To do this, you will need to access the Marketplacer Ad unit template and Download it as a Comma Separate Value (csv) file.
Step 4: Once you have the file, go back into Ad Manager and upload the file by accessing Ad Units, then Bulk upload new ad units.
From here, you can build your campaigns and upload creatives using the `Line items` area. If you have a Google account, you can also access the Google Publisher University for further training resources on Google Ad manager.
Step 5: Once you have setup your campaigns and creatives in Ad Manager, you can test them on your staging environment, which can usually be found by accessing the following URL:
<yourmarketplace.staging.marketplacer.com/admin>
Once you have logged in to Admin, browse to Configuration → External Account Settings.
Step 6: Turn on the Google Ad Manager integration by checking the 'Enable Google Ad Manager Integration?' setting. You’ll also need to enter your Account ID, which can be found in the top left of the screen in Google Ad Manager.
Remember if you complete this task on your staging environment, you’ll also need to do the same on your production environment to have Ad Manager serve ads on your live website.
Step 7: That’s it! Once this step is completed you should start seeing banners that are served from Google Ad Manager. This will also stop any banners that were set up in the old banner system from displaying.
Step 8: If you want to ensure that third-party ads aren't served by AdSense, you'll want to remove your site from your AdSense account: login to your AdSense account and go to Sites -> Overview -> and remove the site in question.
Ad units
Our integrations supports the following ad unit sizes - they are used across the various page templates on the platform:
Key-value targeting
Key-value targeting allows you to target banners on specific pages of your site. For example, if you only want to serve a promotional sale banner on a specific brand page - you can do this through key-value targeting.
The Marketplacer platform exposes a number of key-values:
- advert_id - can be used to target banners on specific adverts.
- hostname - used to target specific domains.
- url - used to target specific pages. This would largely be used for promo pages and the home page (differs form hostname because you don't need to specify the domain).
- brand - used to target the search results of specific brands.
- taxon - used to target the search results of a specific taxonomy (category).
To use key-value targeting, you'll first need to define the key-values on Google Ad Manager. To do this, you'll need to:
1. Navigate to `Inventory` -> `Key-values` on the left hand panel of your Google Ad Manager account:
You will then be presented with an empty key-values screen:
2. Click `New Key` (you will need to do this for each key):
The following page will load:
3. Enter the information as below for each of the keys that you want to add:
4. Once you have added the keys you require, you can begin adding values to each of the keys you have created. First, click on the key you want to add values to, then click `Add Values`
The values you add, are specific the key they're being added to. For example, for `advert_id`, the values that you add are the Marketplacer advert ID's for the ads you want to target - whereas if adding a value to the `taxon` key, you would use the Marketplacer taxonomy slug as the value to target a specific taxonomy page. The values per key are as follows:
| Key | Value | Example |
| advert_id | The advert ID of the ad you want to target. | 104765062 |
| hostname | The full URL of the site you want to target. | www.bikexchange.com.au |
| url | The pathname of a page you want to target on your site. | /promo/where-the-world-rides |
| brand | The brand of slug of the brand page you want to target. | santini |
| taxon | The taxon slug of the taxon you want to target. | pannier-bags |
Here is what our example key-values page looks like:
Once you have set the key-values up, you will be able to target specific pages to display banners.
Getting a banner online
There are a lot of great resources on the internet that go into specific detail on how to create Google Ad Manager campaigns. However, we have included a basic video guide showing how to get a header banner on the search results page of your site:
It can take up to 60 minutes for Google Ad Manager changes to propagate and display on your site. This is what our site looked like after following the steps in our video guide:
Homepage banner note
To display banners on homepage or promo pages you will need to use the Banner slot component in the home page builder, then the url targeting key value if you want to target specific banners to pages.