System maximums and limits

Understand the limits set on line items, creatives, yield groups, and more

Google Ad Manager enforces the following limits to ensure system stability:

Monitor your network's maximums and limits

  1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
  2. Click Admin, then Global settings, and then Limits.

Limits in the dashboard followed by a number in bold text are network-wide limits (for example: 100,000 | 6,000 current). The number in bold represents the number that the network currently has. Those without a number in bold are local limits, listed for reference. If the limit in the table does not match the limit in this article, an exception may apply.

If your network uses Teams, only members of the "All entities" Team can view the Limits dashboard.

Delivery, inventory and key-values, reporting, and MCM

Delivery

  Limit
Total line items 600,000
Active line items and creatives with targeting 61,000
Line items per order * 450
Programmatic line items per order 150
Contending line items per ad request 300
Total creatives 1,000,000
Creatives per line item 260

Targeted criteria per entity

Entities include:

  • Marketplace package
  • Partner Assignment
  • Presentation
  • Protection
  • Saved targeting expressions
  • Line items
  • Other rules (DFL, video, mobile, channels, and declarations)
800
Native styles per ad format 500

* Avoid approving or copying more than 50 line items at the same time to prevent errors.

Inventory and key-values

  Limit
Active ad units 100,000
Active placements 60,000
Active key-value pairs 2,500,000
Active keys (pre-defined and dynamic) 200
Ad units per placement 1,000
Apps* 10,000
Characters per key 20
Characters per value 40
Active values per key (pre-defined and dynamic)** 100,000

* You must change the Apps page filter from the default "All visible apps" value to the "All apps" value in order to see all Apps that contribute to your network limit.

** All active values are listed when viewing a key in Google Ad Manager for both keys that have pre-defined values and keys that have dynamic values. A value is active until/unless it is deleted.

Multiple Customer Management (MCM)

  Limit
Accepted child invitations 2,500
Pending child invitations 1,000

Reporting

  Limit
Reportable key values 30,000
Custom dimension key values 20,000

Yield groups

  Limit
Yield partners per yield group 50
Yield groups 500

Limits on the use of line items

You can use line items to help manage orders. Each line item type supports specific use cases. The following requirements ensure that all equivalent demand sources are treated the same and that Google’s ability to make changes that benefit all publishers is maintained.

Unless otherwise authorized by Google via a contract amendment, you can only use line items for the specific purposes described here. Any other use will be treated as invalid activity.

  • Sponsorship and Standard: these line items can only be used to represent guaranteed demand. For example, use these to represent a direct advertiser deal with a fixed price and guaranteed volume.
  • Price Priority, Bulk and Network: these line items can only be used to represent non-guaranteed demand. For example, use these to represent third-party ad networks or exchanges.
  • House: these line items can only be used to represent demand where you, the Ad Manager account holder, own the product or service being advertised.

Note that for ad serving and to enforce limits on line items requirements:

  • Price Priority, Bulk and Network line items that don't compete on price in the unified auction (such as line items with a zero rate and no Value CPM) are treated as House line items.
  • Any line item type can be used to represent non-revenue generating demand (for example, pro-bono).

Active line items

The count of active line items includes creatives with creative-level targeting assigned and any line item that:

  • is capable of being delivered
  • has a status of "ready" or "delivering"
  • has start date of today or earlier
  • has an end date of today or later

To avoid reaching this limit, consider deactivating line items that are active, but not delivering.

Learn more about how to find line items in Ad Manager.

Targeted criteria per line item

In general, what you see in the targeting expression counts toward the limit.

  • Placement targeting: Each placement counts as one targeting criteria, even if the placement itself contains more than one ad unit.
  • Day/Time targeting: If you use day/time targeting, the contiguous active blocks for each day of the week count as one criteria toward the total targeting criteria limit.

    If you had a line item that runs from 3pm-7pm each day, it would count as 7 targeting criteria (one targeting parameter times seven days). If you had a line item with 11am-1pm and 2pm - 5pm blocks on weekdays, it would count as 10 targeting criteria (2 active blocks for each day of 5 days).

  • Key-values: Each key-value pair counts as one targeting criteria toward the limit. If the expression uses match types, like key is not ~value*, each key to match type value is counted as one targeting criteria toward the limit.
  • User domains: Each user domain counts as one targeting criteria toward the limit.

Frequency capping doesn't count toward the targeting criteria limit.

Show examples

Example

  • Line item targeting:

    • Ad Unit: 300x250Web
    • Key-values: (cat=Education AND art_id=123) OR color=blue OR env=test OR clubcode=XYZ
    • Geography: United States
  • Count:
    Ad Unit (1) + Key-values (5) + Geography (1) = 7 targeted criteria

Example

  • Line item targeting:

    • Placement: BannerROS
    • Key-values: (cat=Education OR cat=Sports OR cat=Business) AND (color=blue OR color=green) AND (topic is not ~politics*)
    • Day/time: 3pm-7pm each day of the week
  • Count:
    Placement (1) + Custom Criteria (6) + Day/Time (7) = 14 targeted criteria

Mediation ad networks

At serving, up to 50 networks are chosen as part of the mediation chain sent to the SDK. Building longer chains risks greater latency, since additional sequential callouts are required.

Ad units, key-values, tagging, and inventory

Ad units

  Limit
Active ad units 99,998
Ad unit codes 100 characters

Placements

  Limit
Ad units per placement 1,000
Active units per network 60,000

Key-values

  Limit
Characters per key 20
Characters per value 40
Active values per network 2,500,000
Active keys (dynamic and pre-defined) per network 200
Active values (dynamic and pre-defined) per key 100,000
Reportable key-values 30,000
Custom dimensions 10
Custom dimension key-values (note the limit is 5,000 if you don't have Google Ad Manager 360) 20,000

Network settings

  Limit
Ad unit frequency cap labeling rules 10

Protections

  Limit
Advertisers/brands per Ad content protection 200
Total advertisers/brands and/or General categories per Competition protection
Note: The limit is 100 if you've configured as a multi-group block
50
Buyers per Ad content protection 200
General categories per Ad content protection 200
Advertiser URLs per Ad content protection 25,000
Ad units per Competition protection 800
Protections per Network 300

Audience

  Limit
Total first-party segments per network, including active, inactive, and audience extension segments 20,000
Maximum file size per batch upload 1 GB
Number of batch upload files per 24 hours 500
Total batch upload file size per 24 hours 5 GB

Tagging

  Limit
Google Publisher Tags (GPT) and video tags 61,440 characters
Tagless request 4,096 characters
SRA (single request architecture) requests 30 ad slots per request

URLs

  Limit
URLs generated by ad serving, such as macros 2,048 characters

Unified Pricing rules

  Limit
Active Unified Pricing rules 200
Price floors per rule 5
Advertisers per rule 50
Sizes per rule 250

Ad unit codes

  • Ad unit codes can be up to 100 characters in length and must be unique.
  • Only letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens, periods, asterisks, forward slashes, backslashes, exclamation marks, left angle brackets, colons, and parentheses are allowed.

Tagging and key-values

An ad request URL has a character limit, depending on the tag type, which may limit the number of key-values.

Google Publisher Tags use the HTTP GET method to request ads, which limits the number of bytes that can be passed with each request. Ad tags are limited to 61,440 characters per request.

You can include a maximum of 30 ad slots per SRA (single request architecture) request. If you're using SRA, limit the number of ad slots in your requests and ensure that you only call defineSlot() when you also call display().

Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI)

Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) scales with the millions of viewers who watch live TV. To protect Google's infrastructure, Google DAI has soft limits in place that can be adjusted by reaching out to your account team.

Prepare to run large live events and ensure that the Best practices for DAI backup streams are implemented, and review the Powering live events with Ad Manager's Dynamic Ad Insertion blog post.

    Default soft limit
Manifest requests per second The amount of total client requests for the manifest per second. Affected by the target duration of the manifest as well as muxed/demux audio and type of playlist HLS/DASH. 25,000
Manifest size The uncompressed size of the manifest. Affected by the length of the DVR window and target duration. 1 MiB
Live streams Total non-archived live streams 700
Pod serving Total non-archived DAI encoding profiles 250 per network

25 per live stream

Reports

    Limit
Reporting Dimensions per report 10 dimensions
Metrics per report No limit *
Data availability Up to 3 years
Saved report storage period 40 days
Concurrent reports per network 30
Data Transfer File storage period 60 days

* There is no limit to the number of metrics you can add to a report, but processing time slows as you add more metrics.

Report exports

The Excel report export options (XLS and XLSX) are deactivated when either of these two scenarios are met:

  • The 65,000 XLS or 1,000,000 XLSX row limit is exceeded.
  • The report contains a particularly large amount of data regardless of row count. For example, an excessive number of report columns.

Teams and network administration

    Limit
Teams Entities per team 3,000
Custom fields Custom fields per location 30
Values per drop-down custom field 300

Privacy & messaging

    Limit
GDPR settings Add custom ad partner URLs 50
Select custom ad partners  700
URL path inclusion/exclusion settings per domain Offerwall (Beta) and ad blocking recovery messages 5

Limits on rapid item creation

Ad Manager monitors networks to ensure that technical glitches aren't causing runaway creation of orders, line items, creatives, ad units, placements, or advertisers. In such cases, to protect your network, Ad Manager places a temporary limit on the creation of new items.

For example, if an external program that uses the Ad Manager API to connect to your network creates thousands of new orders in a very short time period, it's probably an error. These temporary limits can be imposed even if the rapid creation hasn't violated any of the numerical limits listed above.

Unpredictable traffic spikes

Publishers sending an unusual amount of increased traffic may experience elevated latency to handle the unexpected spike in traffic. 

We spread the additional traffic across multiple regions that are below peak in order to handle the increase in traffic, which could result in additional latency.

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