Use dynamic allocation to optimize every impression

Ad Manager helps you earn the highest price for every ad impression with dynamic allocation. This feature maximizes revenue from Ad Exchange, AdSense, Open Bidding, and remnant line items, without compromising the performance of guaranteed line item delivery.

There are a number of advantages to having Ad Exchange and AdSense compete with your other Ad Manager line items:

• Higher CPMs for Ad Exchange, AdSense and other ad network impressions
• Ad Exchange or AdSense will only deliver if they can offer a higher CPM than your other Ad Manager line items

Tips for managing effective competition

Define accurate CPM rate for line items

Declaring the correct CPM rate or value CPM rate for each line item is essential for Ad Manager to make the best decision about which line item to deliver.

• As you start out with Ad Manager, you can use the average CPM in your ad network’s interface as a starting point for line items representing ad networks.
• For line items that represent a direct deal with an advertiser, you should also set an accurate CPM representing the value of the deal. 
• If you use optimized competition, a standard line item's CPM is used as a floor for the temporary CPM calculated for the line item. 
• For remnant line items, setting an accurate CPM (or CPC) allows Ad Manager to allocate impressions to these deals in a way that optimizes your total revenue.

In some cases, you might receive one creative from an ad network that performs better on some sections of your content than others. In this case, we recommend you create separate line items targeted to the different inventory, each with a unique CPM rate that accurately reflects how that ad network performs on that inventory, specifically.

Example

Let’s say you have a network line item trafficked to both your homepage and sports ad units. The average CPM for this line item is $2.00, but when you report by ad unit you find that your homepage ad unit yields a $3.00 CPM and your sports ad unit yields only a $1.50 CPM.

In this case, you might want to create one line item targeted to the homepage ad unit with a $3.00 CPM and another line item targeted to the sports ad unit with a $1.50 CPM.

Set frequency caps for your ad network line items

A single network can’t fill every ad request and the value of impressions served to the same user decreases in value over time. Using a frequency cap for these line items can allow you to control how often an ad network serves an impression to the same user.

One of your goals as a publisher should be to get all of your ad networks to as near a 100% fill rate as possible, and one lever you have in your control is the frequency cap.

• Start out with a cap of four impressions per day. If you find your fill rate immediately jumps to near 100%, then the frequency cap may be too tight and you may be missing out on impressions that the ad network could have filled if you had allowed the network to take more impressions.

• In this case, loosen the frequency cap to six impressions per day, and keep adjusting until you see that the fill rate remains steady in the 90-100% range.

• Alternatively, if you find that the fill rate is still not in the 90-100% range, try tightening your frequency cap to two impressions per day and see if you find improved fill rates.

Most networks have fill rates that are constantly fluctuating, so it’s important to keep an eye on your frequency caps and adjust them as necessary.