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DoubleClick for Publishers

Delivery controls

Use labels to prevent competing ads on a page

Sometimes advertisers ask publishers to prevent their line items from being served on the same page in a single session along with the line items of their competitors. For example, an airline advertiser might request that you not serve their line items together with other airline advertisers.

You can prevent the line items of competitors from serving together by applying competitive exclusion labels to advertisers, orders, or line items. Labels applied to advertisers and orders are automatically applied to their line items.

You can only apply labels to advertisers, house advertisers, and ad networks. You can’t apply labels to agencies or house agencies.

Competitive exclusion labels don't apply to AdSense or Ad Exchange line items.

When you apply a label to an advertiser, by default you're preventing multiple line items from the same advertiser from appearing on the page. You can make an exception and allow multiple line items from the same advertiser to deliver to the same page and to the same user. See the step-by-step procedure below to learn how.

How do labels block line items?

Let’s use an example:

One of your advertisers, Comfort Airlines, doesn’t want its ads to be delivered with ads of other airlines on the same web page at the same time. So in DoubleClick for Publishers, you create the label ‘Airlines’ and apply it to all of your airline advertisers. When a user loads your web page and a line item from Comfort Airlines delivers to an ad tag on that page, the ad server, knowing that it can’t serve another line item labeled 'Airlines' during that same page load, will skip all other line items labeled 'Airlines' and instead will only consider other eligible line items that aren’t labeled ‘Airlines’. These other line items could have a different label (for instance, ‘Autos’) or no label at all.


To prevent labeled line items from delivering together:

  1. Create a label.

  2. Apply the label to an advertiser, orders, or line items.

    Labels are inherited. This means that if you apply a label to an advertiser, it will be applied to the advertiser's orders and line items automatically. If you apply a label to an order, it will be applied to the advertiser's or the order's line items automatically.

  3. (Optional) If you want to allow line items from the same advertiser to serve, then on the 'Settings' tab of every line item for which you want to make the exception, select Allow same advertiser exception.

 

Considerations

  • You don't need to use competitive ad exclusion labels for all of your advertisers, just those who have expressed concern about showing up next to their competitors.

  • Since you're telling the ad server not to serve more than one line item from a given label to a page, competitive ad exclusion labels may limit the number of impressions that are available for a given line item. Forecasting takes this into consideration, so while the amount of impressions will be limited, forecasts will still be accurate. You can increase the amount of available inventory by targeting the line items to a wider audience, for example.

  • Using labels will not stop roadblocks from serving as expected. If you apply a label to an advertiser, order, or line item, and if you have set up that line item as a roadblock, multiple creatives will still serve together on the same page. Learn more about roadblocking.

  • If you are using legacy DART ad tags, work with your webmaster to ensure the ad tags on your web page use sequential tile values. For example, the first tag should have tile=1, the second tag should have tile=2 and so on. Also, the tags must have matching ORD random number attributes with each page load in order for labels to work.

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