System maximums and limits

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

• Limits for orders, line items, creatives, and yield groups
• Limits on the use of line items
• Ad units, key-values, tagging, and inventory
• Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI)
• Reports
• Teams and network administration
• System 

Monitor your network's maximums and limits

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Click Admin Global settings 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.

Limits for 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
Total creatives	1,000,000
Creatives per line item	260
Targeted criteria per line item	800
Native styles per ad format	500

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 & free-form)	200
Ad units per placement	1,000
Characters per key	20
Characters per value	40
Active values per key (pre-defined & free-form)	100,000

Reporting

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

Multiple Customer Management (MCM)

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

 

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 do not 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 does not 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 10 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 protection	200
Buyers per protection	200
General categories per protection	200
Advertiser URLs per protection	25,000
Ad units per competitive exclusion	800
Protections per network	300

Audience

	Limit
Total first-party segments per network, including active, inactive, and audience extension segments	20,000

Tagging

	Limit
Google Publisher Tags (GPT) and IMA SDK requests	15,360 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 15,360 characters per request.

You can include a maximum of 30 ad slots per SRA (single request architecture) request. If you are 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 which 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
	Data availability (Ad Exchange Historical report)	Up to 2 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 is 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

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.