Trafficking best practices for in-stream video creatives

Below you’ll find some common scenarios traffickers might come across when working with in-stream video creatives.

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Site-serving: Use tracking ads

Some businesses provide video assets directly to publishers and track them using Campaign Manager 360. This is known as site-serving, and it's a common scenario if a publisher doesn’t accept VAST tags. If you’re using this workflow, we recommend using tracking ads to measure video events.

• Create a tracking ad for each video event you’re tracking. Name the tracking ad with the name of the event for easier reporting. We recommend:
  • Impressions
  • Clicks
  • Starts
  • 25% Quartile
  • 50% Quartile
  • 75% Quartile
  • 100% Quartile
  • Skips, if the publisher accepts them
• Ask your publisher to implement each tracking ad at the corresponding point of the video. If you wanted to track video starts, for example, you could have the publisher implement a “Starts” tracking ad to correspond with the start of your video ad.

Publisher-specific videos: Turn off transcodes

Certain publishers have strict specifications for the types of videos they accept. Always make sure you connect with publishers to request details about their sites in your media plan.

You can control the transcode settings for all creatives assigned to a placement from the "In-stream video settings" section of the placement. If you know that a publisher accepts only .mp4 transcodes, for example, set the included transcodes for the placement to only .mp4 serving files.  

Cookieless environments: Include untargeted ads

Cookieless environments include mobile phones, streaming devices, gaming systems, and smart TVs. All of these environments accept VAST tags, but serving protocols are different per device.

Ads that use cookie-based targeting, such as audience segments, creative sequencing, geographic targeting, and demographic targeting, will serve blank VAST responses in a cookieless environment. To ensure that you always have an eligible ad to show to users, make sure that your placement contains an untargeted ad.

Programmatic video: Syncing creatives to Display & Video 360

If you’ve linked your Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 advertisers and sync creatives, there are a few things to keep in mind when setting up videos.

Creative sync

• Placements need at least one creative without any frequency capping or targeting. If the default video for your campaign is not the same duration as other video creatives in the campaign, create an ad rotation that is low priority and untargeted to function as the default for that placement.
• Make sure your landing pages are consistent within your placement.
• It can take a few minutes for placements to sync to Display & Video 360.
• Display & Video 360’s creative approval process can take a few hours to complete before your creative will be eligible to serve.
• Remember that Campaign Manager 360 placements appear as creatives in Display & Video 360.

Media Asset ID: an alternative to creative URLs

 

Use Media Asset ID <mediafile> in your VAST tags instead of creative URLs to identify media assets in your platforms. 

Media Asset IDs provide unique, static identifiers within video VAST tag <mediafile> nodes for each individual video transcode, not just the uploaded asset. This will help avoid disruptions to QA processes, as video media file URLs in our VAST tags become dynamic.

VAST tag placement nodes have an “id” string attribute that can include any value, and it will populate for all media files with an asset ID as {AssetID}-{Transcode ID}. All transcodes in the same upload will have the same asset ID. 

Here's a sample of how the data will appear: 

<mediafile id=”1234-5”></mediafile> <mediafile id=”1234-694”></mediafile>