Set up pretargeting groups

Filter bid requests based on targeting

Pretargeting ensures that you get only desired bid requests. You can set up pretargeting groups that act as filters for bid requests.

Pretargeting is set up in Authorized Buyers under Bidder settings or via the PretargetingConfig resource in the REST API. You can have up to 10 pretargeting groups.

Selecting targeting criteria

All inventory is included, by default. This applies to every category in the targeting selector. This behavior changes once you explicitly include criteria within a category. For example, click include on the "300x250" criterion in the "Inventory sizes" category to include only 300x250 and exclude all sizes that are not explicitly included.

Selecting multiple criteria within the same category results in OR logic. For example, click include on the "United States" and "Canada" criteria in the "Geography" category to receive callouts for impressions that are either from the United States or Canada.

Selecting multiple criteria across different categories results in AND logic. For example, click include on the "300x250" criterion in the "Creative sizes" category, and include on the "United States" and "Canada" criteria in the "Geography" category to receive callouts for impressions that are for 300x250 inventory and from either from the United States or Canada.

Preferred Deals and Private Auctions

You can choose to enable pretargeting for all Private Auctions and Preferred Deals. When enabled, bid requests for Private Auctions and Preferred Deals that don’t meet your defined pretargeting settings will still be sent to you instead of being filtered.

Navigate to Bidder settings, and then Pretargeting and enable at the top of the page.

Pretargeting never applies to Programmatic Guaranteed as they are negotiated with a specific seller under terms that they should serve as intended.

Billing ID and bid responses

When enabled, buyers receive an additional Billing ID (billing_id) in bid requests for Private Auctions and Preferred Deals. To bid as Private Auctions and Preferred Deals, bid responses must include the deal ID. To bid as Open Auction, Bidders may respond with only billing ID for bids and forgo passing deal ID, but only if only_deal_bids_accepted is not TRUE. Otherwise, bid responses must also include the deal ID.

Learn more about both these attributes in the Authorized Buyers Real-Time Bidding Proto developer docs.

Add new pretargeting groups

Sign in to Authorized Buyers.
Navigate to Bidder settings, and then Pretargeting.
Click New pretargeting group.
Name the group.
By default, new groups are set to active. However, you may set a group to Paused if you don't want the pretargeting to apply yet.
Select format: Banner, Audio and Video, or Native.
Set daily budget cap. Daily budget cap is required and limits daily spend.
(Optional) Set the Maximum QPS for each pretargeting group.

Maximum Queries per second (QPS)

This is the maximum number of queries per second (QPS) allowed for the pretargeting configuration. Leave this blank (blank by default) if you do not want to limit the QPS volume for the pretargeting configuration.

Frequently asked questions

What if the volume of QPS entered is more than the maximum QPS configured for the account?
The maximum QPS configured for the account will always be respected regardless of QPS caps set in pretargeting.

Is there a way to reserve QPS for a specific pretargeting group?
Yes, you can reserve QPS for a specific pretargeting group. For example, say a bidder has a capacity for 50k QPS in their account setup, and has pretargeting groups A, B, and C for which group C is a video pretargeting group. One can cap groups A and B to a combined QPS of 40k, meaning pretargeting group C will have 10k in reserve for video at all times (based on the account max of 50k).

What happens when a query matches two configurations with different limits?
If an impression opportunity matches both Pretargeting Group A and Pretargeting Group B, with Group A having a limit of 40k and Group B having a limit of 20k, the higher limit will be used (40k in this case). Bidders should also expect the receive both instances of billing_id of the matching pretargeting groups.
In the Environment section, select whether to: include all, exclude all, or target specific apps/sites. See more detailed examples in the "Common targeting scenarios" section.

Learn more about configuring Environment criteria

Selecting multiple apps and sites results in OR logic. For example, targeting a list of both sites and apps means they will both be included.

Once configured, the Environment section will result in AND logic with the other settings within the same pretargeting configuration, which means bid requests will need to meet both the Environment criteria and the Settings criteria to be sent to the bidder.

For example, if a list of apps is selected in the Environment section and France is included within the Settings Geographies section, then only bid requests for the specified apps for users in France will be sent.

Select the URLs and mobile apps that you wish to receive bid requests for. Do not use app store or other URLs to target app inventory, only use the app ID in the mobile app dimension.

In the Settings section, define your targeting by selecting a category, finding the desired criteria, and clicking either include or exclude. See more detailed examples in the "Common targeting scenarios" section.

All traffic to this pretargeting is filtered if the buyer excludes all "Sensitive Categories".

Learn more about selecting User identifiers criteria

Note that bid requests from App, CTV, and console traffic will be filtered if there are no hosted match entries present when the buyer has chosen to only target traffic with hosted match entries (Pretargeting configuration, then User identifiers, and then Hosted match table entry present)

Hosted match entries will be present for Apps when the buyer has enabled Same Device Targeting. CTV and console traffic will never have hosted match entries. Hosted match table entry present therefore in general means limiting to web-only inventory unless other user identifier targeting is also selected.

Learn more about Same Device Targeting

	Web traffic	App/CTV/Console
Hosted match table entry present	Bid requests without HM entry are filtered
Google user ID present	Bid requests without Google user ID are filtered
Device advertising ID present	Bid requests without Device advertising ID are filtered

Click Save after you've made your selections. The added configuration will display in the list.

Edit a pretargeting configuration

In your Authorized Buyers account, click on Bidder settings, and then Pretargeting.
Select the configuration you want to edit.
Make your changes and click Save.

Delete a pretargeting configuration

In your Authorized Buyers account, click on Bidder settings, and then Pretargeting.
Select the configuration you want to edit.
1. Click Delete in the bottom right corner.

Language limitations

Brand safety categories and content classifiers are available in 12 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Traditional Chinese, and Korean.

Exceptions:

Sexually suggestive content and Death and tragedy are not available for the following languages: Korean and Traditional Chinese.
Violent content is not available in Traditional Chinese.

Common targeting scenarios

When creating a pretargeting configuration, use the illustrated examples below to determine the correct category and criteria options in the targeting selector.

Expand all Collapse all

Format examples

Environment and Platforms examples

Web and App targeting selections have an OR relationship with each other and an AND relationship with all other pretargeting configurations.

Include all apps or sites

Target specific apps (upload a CSV file)

From the Environment section, navigate to Apps, then Target specific apps and categories, and then Apps.
Select a targeting behavior and upload a CSV file containing a list of apps. Download the sample file to use as a reference.

Target specific app categories

From the Environment section, navigate to Apps, then Target specific apps and categories, and then App categories. Select a platform to include all categories within it. Exclude a specific category by going into each platform and clicking exclude.

Target specific sites (upload a CSV file)

From the Environment section, navigate to Web, and then Target specific sites. Next, select a targeting behavior and upload a CSV file containing a list of sites. Download the sample file to use as a reference.

Environment and Platforms

Mobile inventory only (no desktop banner, no mobile app)

Mobile app inventory only (no desktop banner, no mobile web)

Mobile video inventory only (no desktop video)

Video inventory, Connected TV only

Target Publisher Provided ID

Publisher Provided ID (PPID) is not available with 3P user ids, such as google_user_id, hosted_match_data, device ids, and is not available in the EEA.

Other examples

Mobile app inventory, only interstitials

Historical viewability

Identity and secure signals

Publisher IDs

Use this to include or exclude bid requests from specific publishers. Publisher IDs can be found in bid requests and ads.txt/app-ads.txt files. Note that the Publisher IDs dimension has an AND relationship with web and app dimensions, e.g. you can target specific sites and apps while excluding certain publishers. If you previously used multiple sites and apps to target or exclude inventory for a given publisher, you can now manage this more easily by using the publisher ID instead.

Example

You included "www.domain.xyz" in web pretargeting, and "www.domain.xyz" lists pub-0000000000000000 and pub-9999999999999999 as publisher IDs for that domain. If you exclude pub-9999999999999999, you will only receive inventory from "www.domain.xyz" sold through pub-0000000000000000.

Navigate to Bidder settings, and then Publisher IDs.
Select a targeting behavior (Include or Exclude).
Upload a CSV file containing a list of publisher IDs. Publisher IDs should be formatted as pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Download the sample file to use as a reference.

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