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
• Reports
• Teams and network administration

Orders, line items, creatives, and yield groups

_{* 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 may 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 may only be used for representing 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 may only be used for representing non-guaranteed demand. For example, use these to represent third-party ad networks or exchanges.
• House: these line items may only be used for representing demand where you, the Ad Manager account holder, own the product or service being advertised.

Note that for ad serving and for the purposes of enforcing the 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) will be 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 are using 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 running 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).

• Frequency capping: Does not count toward the targeting criteria limit.
• 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.

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 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 using asynchronous rendering are limited to15,360 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're only calling defineSlot() when you're also calling display().

Reports

_{* There is no limit to the number of metrics you can add to a report, but processing time will slow as you add more metrics.}

Report exports

Teams and network administration

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 is creating 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.