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 and then Global settings and then Limits.

Limits in the dashboard followed by a number in parentheses are network-wide limits. Those without a number in parentheses 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 orders, line items, creatives, and yield groups

Orders

  Limit
Line items per order (regardless of status,
including archived line items)		 450
Characters per order name 255

Proposals

  Limit
Proposal line items per proposal (regardless of
status, including archived line items)		 150

Line items

  Limit
Total line items per network (regardless of status,
including inactive and deleted line items)		 600,000
Active line items 61,000
Creatives per line item 260
Targeted criteria per line item 800
Characters per line item name 255
Labels 51

Creatives

  Limit
Total creatives per network 1,000,000
Creative asset size 1 million bytes
Video creative asset minimum size 4,000 bytes
Video creative asset maximum size 512 MB 2
Video creative asset length greater than 1 second
Total native styles per native ad format 500
Pattern match macro replacements 100 per creative

Frequency caps

  Limit
Impressions per frequency cap 511
Minutes per frequency cap 120
Hours per frequency cap 48
Days per frequency cap 14
Weeks per frequency cap 26
Months per frequency cap 6

Yield groups

  Limit
Yield groups per Ad Manager network 100
Yield groups you can bulk edit or copy at a time 10
Mediation ad networks per yield group 20
Key-values per targeting expression in a yield group 5 keys, 100 values
Criteria per targeting expression in a yield group 1,000
Targeting criteria per line item 800

1. If you select a child label with a parent label, it counts as 1. Learn more about Label Inheritance.
2. The maximum video creative asset size varies depending on your Ad Manager contract. Learn more about Video Solutions feature availability.

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 500
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.

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