Below are some answers to the most commonly asked questions about content mapping.
Overview FAQs
What is content mapping?
What are the benefits of content mapping?
For publishers, content mapping can improve revenue potential by increasing the relevance of ads to users, which may help advertisers to bid more for your inventory. It can also improve your advertisers' brand safety, which enables more advertisers to bid safely on your inventory.
For your advertisers, content mapping increases ad performance by placing more relevant ads in mobile apps and improves advertiser brand safety by preventing ads from appearing next to unsuitable content.
For your users, content mapping improves user experience by showing users ads that are more relevant to them.How does content mapping work?
What ad formats are supported?
All formats are technically supported. However, some formats are easier to map than others. Ultimately, all you have to do is provide Google with content URLs that show a complete and accurate mapping of all the content surrounding an ad placement.
Check out our example implementations to understand how to map for various formats.Does content mapping improve performance for all my ad units?
What type of content is not supported with content mapping?
- Private content (example: direct messages or chat features)
- Real-time content (example: live-streaming)
Implementation FAQs
Should I have a web presence to use content mapping?
No. You don’t need a web presence to use content mapping. You just need to create URLs that can be accessed by our crawler for AdMob or Ad Manager. The content must be rendered in HTML format, but it doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing. In fact, you can simply upload a screenshot of the content around the ad.
You can also password protect your passed URLs to ensure that only Google has access to the underlying web-hosted content. It doesn’t need to be available to your users.
Should URLs be aesthetically pleasing?
URLs don’t have to be aesthetically pleasing and you do not need an active, public-facing web presence. As long as the URL is in html format and crawlable by Google, you can pass images, videos, and even screenshots of your app.
While the URLs don’t need to be aesthetically pleasing, they must completely and accurately correspond to the content in your app.I don't want to host my content on publicly accessible URLs. What should I do?
I have a privacy policy with my users. How does this work with content mapping?
If you have a privacy agreement with your users to not share certain portions of their information, please make sure you do not pass any such information in your content mapping URLs.
It is your responsibility to navigate and follow your user privacy agreement that’s established with your users. From Google's perspective, PII refers to information that can be used on its own to identify an individual user who is viewing the ad in question.
Content mapping requires a complete and accurate mapping of all content surrounding an ad unit. However, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the content you pass to Google complies with the privacy agreement you have with your users.
You can remove any PII (examples: full names, email addresses, geolocation parameters) within the content URLs that you send Google. We require a complete and accurate mapping of app content, but anything considered PII can be removed or replaced with a unique identifier prior to sending content URLs to Google.
Learn more about understanding PII in Google’s contracts and policies for AdMob or Ad Manager.