This article walks you through how to identify the advertising opportunities, or inventory, on your website and how to build out that inventory in DFP Premium.
Ad units
Imagine printing a hard copy of your home page and cutting out all of the ads. Each empty space is an opportunity to advertise. DFP defines each space, or similar spaces appearing throughout your website, as an ad unit. Ad units are also used to represent video and mobile inventory.
Ad units can be reused across different web pages, reducing the need to create unique ad units for every single ad space on your website. You can use custom criteria to further distinguish between individual ad spaces instead.
DoubleClick for Publishers supports five levels of ad unit hierarchy. Organizing your inventory hierarchically enables you to:
Easily target a line item to your entire website (RON or Run of Network)- Level 1: Sports (automatically targeted)
- Level 2 Baseball (inherits targeting)
- Level 2 Baseball (inherits targeting)
- Level 2: Football (inherits targeting)
- Level 2: Hockey (inherits targeting)
- Level 1: Finance (automatically targeted)
- Level 1: Weather (automatically targeted)
Level 1: Sports (targeted)
Level 1: Finance (not targeted)
Level 1: Weather (not targeted)
- Level 1: Sports (targeted)
- Level 2: Baseball (inherits targeting)
- Level 2: Football (inherits targeting)
- Level 2: Hockey (inherits targeting)
| Level 1: Website A (targeted) | ||
| Level 2: Sports (inherits targeting) | ||
| Level 3: Baseball (inherits targeting) | ||
| Level 3: Football (inherits targeting) | ||
| Level 3: Hockey (inherits targeting) | ||
| Level 2: Finance (inherits targeting) | ||
| Level 2: Weather (inherits targeting) | ||
| Level 1: Website B (not selected) | ||
| Level 2: Xbox 360 (not selected) | ||
| Level 2: PS3 (not selected) | ||
| Level 2: Wii (not selected) |
Your website might include a handful or a couple hundred of ad units. It would be tedious to sell these individual ad units to advertisers. You can group logically associated ad units into placements. A placement is a group of related ad units that might interest advertisers.
You can protect expensive, sensitive, or strategic inventory from "flow-down" targeting by marking it as a special ad unit.
Ad tags
An ad unit defined within DFP doesn't do anything until you link it with your website using an ad tag. When a user views a page on your website, the ad tag, which is just a snippet of code, makes a call to DFP and fetches an ad for display.
The Google Publisher Tag supports SSL and asynchronous rendering, and has a single request architecture for faster and more secure page loads. (Learn more about Google Publisher Tags)
Design your website's inventory
Now that you’ve identified your inventory, it’s time to design your ad unit hierarchy and the custom criteria that you will be using.