Approve an order

Reserve inventory and prepare for delivery

What happens when an order is approved

Ad Manager reserves inventory

Reserving inventory means that the volume (impressions and clicks, for instance) that you indicated in line items is allocated to that line item. For example, if your homepage gets 100,000 visits per week and you booked a line item for 50,000 impressions for next week, it means you only have 50,000 more impression you can book for another line item.

Only Sponsorship and Standard line items types are eligible to reserve inventory. These line item types are used when you want to promise a certain number of impressions or clicks to your buyer or advertiser.

Other, lower-priority line item types (such as Bulk, House, or Price Priority) are never eligible to reserve inventory. These line item types are used when there's no contractual obligation between you and the buyer or advertiser to serve a certain number or impressions or clicks. Lower-priority line item types only serve if no higher-priority line item types (Sponsorship and Standard) can serve. Learn more about ways of transacting in Ad Manager.

Line items appear as contending

The forecasting feature can help you avoid overbooking and check available impressions or clicks for line items.

Guaranteed line items reserve inventory and represent an agreement with your advertiser, and in many cases also represents a commitment to reach a certain goal of impressions or clicks.  If you book too many line items that need to serve to the same inventory, your network will be overbooked. This means that your network doesn't have enough impressions or clicks to ensure that all these guaranteed line items meet their goal.

If you've checked availability and it looks like your new line item can meet its goal, you can approve your order to reserve the inventory.

When other users in our network try to reserve other line items on the same or similar inventory, they see your line item as "contending". This means that these other line items will compete for the same inventory as your line item. 

To illustrate, let's use our example above, where your homepage gets 100,000 visits per week. If you booked three line items for the same week, each at 50,000 impressions, your campaigns would be overbooked by 50,000 impressions. There's a strong chance that none of your line items can deliver the number of impressions you promised your buyer or advertiser.

Creatives are cleared for delivery

Be sure to add creatives to line items. Approved orders without creatives don't serve ads. Once approved, any creatives associated with the order's line items are free to deliver ads.

Approve an order

The "Approve and reject orders and line items" user role permission is required to approve an order.

  1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
  2. Find the order you want to approve.

    You can use universal search or navigate to Delivery and then Orders to browse or apply filters.

  3. Navigate to the details page for the order.
  4. Click Approve above the list of line items on the details page.

Approve order on details page only

You can only approve an order from its details page, not from the list of all orders. Check above the list of line items on an order's details page to find the Approve option.

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