Video and audio creative profiles

This Video Solutions feature is only available in Google Ad Manager 360.

You may have different creative requirements for various devices, or partner inventory. Use creative profiles to simplify trafficking for these custom requirements by using controls that automatically determine which video or audio creatives are eligible to serve to different platforms, according to signals you set in your ad tag.

This feature works with VAST 2 and higher.

   Access to creative profiles requires the Edit creatives user role permission.

Set up a creative profile

Creative profiles can be set up to explicitly allow any combination of media file types, bitrate ranges, resolutions, and/or whether to allow VAST redirects.* 

To set up a profile:

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Click Video  Video creative profiles  New video creative profile.

3. Configure your new profile by specifying the following:

   1. Name: Enter a unique name that describes the creative criteria.
   2. Restrictions: 

      Select to allow third-party VAST redirects.*

      Choose to either allow all files, or to only allow specific media file types. Available video types are MP4, HLS, DASH, WEBM, MOV, 3GP, and FLV. Available audio types are MP3 (mpeg), MP4, and OGG.

      You can also choose to allow VPAID. If VPAID is allowed in the profile and a VPAID creative is served, ads at any bitrate can serve, regardless of any optional bitrate limits that are set in the profile.

      For Ad Exchange and programmatic ads, any unwanted mime types are not removed. Ad Manager ensures the selected mime types are included, but unlike reservations, other mime types may still serve.

      For example, if you've selected to allow "video/webm", the Ad Exchange VAST response may still contain VPAID, but the response must contain webm at a minimum.

   3. (Optional) Bitrate:

      Specify the minimum and/or maximum bitrate allowed to serve. You can use bitrate settings to ensure low-quality bitrate creatives do not serve to inventory on large screens, or too high bitrate creatives do not serve to mobile placements where the users may have data restrictions.

      This is an optional creative profile setting. Leave these fields blank to allow all bitrates.

      You can select to Enable bitrate filtering for streaming media types. If this option is selected, the entire bitrate and resolution range of the streaming playlist must fall within the bitrate and resolution range defined in the video creative profile. Individual variants within the streaming playlist are not filtered based on the creative profile.
   4. (Optional) Resolution:

      Specify the minimum and/or maximum number of pixels allowed as the creative height and/or width.

      This is an optional creative profile setting. Leave these fields blank to allow all resolutions.

4. Click Save.

To serve to an ad tag with a creative profile, the creative must have at least one of the allowed media files meeting the designated bitrate criteria.

For VAST redirects, media file types are checked when the tag is trafficked. If your profile is set to allow VAST redirects using a media file type that is unavailable at the time the ad is requested, an attempt is still made to serve the creative.

If the profile restricts certain media file types and the creative wrapper contains multiple types, the creative is considered eligible to serve if any of the types are allowed.

* Redirect filtering occurs in Ad Manager only. Disallowing redirects does not filter programmatic responses.

Filter creatives with an existing profile

For Google Ads video demand, creative filtering on HLS mime types are best effort. When a video creative profile only specifies the HLS mime type, some Google Ads video creatives with non-HLS mime types may still serve.

Once you've set up a profile, you need to include it in the ad tag to begin filtering creatives based on the profile configuration. To do this, simply add the pp parameter to the ad tag. For example, to add a profile named "Sample_creative_profile", add pp=Sample_creative_profile to the tag.

Example
The name of the profile is case sensitive and should be URL encoded. For example, if the name of the profile is "Sample creative profile" (using spaces), the ad tag should include pp=Sample%20creative%20profile.

Video creative profiles also support targeting to only video programmatic transaction types (Open Auction, Private Auction, Preferred Deal and Programmatic Guaranteed transaction types). Contact your account manager to enable this feature.