About non-personalized ads

Publishers may sell inventory for users who haven't given consent to be served personalized ads. In order to buy this inventory, you need to use a line item (or line items) that don't use any types of personalization features and thus are eligible to buy non-personalized ad inventory.

What are non-personalized ads?

Non-personalized ads are ads that are not based on a user’s past behavior. They are targeted using contextual information, including coarse (such as city-level) geo-targeting based on current location, and content on the current site or app or current query terms. Google disallows all interest-based audience targeting, including demographic targeting and user list targeting.

Although non-personalized ads can't use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for targeting, they do still use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for frequency capping, conversion tracking, and to combat fraud and abuse. Therefore, you must obtain consent to use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for those purposes where legally required, per the ePrivacy Directive in certain EEA countries, or other privacy regulations worldwide.

What are "personalized ads"?

Google considers ads to be personalized when they are based on previously collected or historical data to determine or influence ad selection, including a user's previous search queries, activity, visits to sites or apps, demographic information, or location. Specifically, this would include, for example: demographic targeting, interest category targeting, remarketing, targeting Customer Match lists, and audience list targeting. 

Guidelines for non-personalized ads

In order to purchase non-personalized ad inventory, a line item's targeting and creatives must adhere to these guidelines.

Targeting requirements

The following types of targeting can be used to buy non-personalized ad inventory:

• Inventory source targeting.
• Brand safety targeting.
• Apps, channels, and website targeting.
• Contextual keywords.
• Category targeting.
• Content-based audience targeting, such as affinity, custom affinity, in-market and custom Intent will work with non-personalized ad inventory because where needed, it can be generated solely using contextual signals
• Environment targeting.
• Viewability targeting.
• Language targeting.
• Day & time targeting.
• Browser targeting.
• Device targeting.
• Video targeting.
• Position targeting.

The following types of targeting are prohibited:

• Other types of audience targeting. This includes audience list targeting, similar audience targeting, installed app category targeting, new mobile device targeting, and other types of audience targeting.
• Geography targeting that's more granular than city-level targeting (for example, ZIP code or postal code).
• Demographic targeting.
• Connection speed, carrier, and ISP targeting.

Creative requirements

The following guidelines apply to creatives assigned to line items that are intended to serve to non-personalized ad inventory:

• Creatives must be served by Display & Video 360 or Campaign Manager 360. Third-party ad servers aren't allowed.
• HTML5 and custom display creatives aren't allowed.
• Creatives can't contain any extra HTML or tracking pixels from any third party or Google.
• Creatives served using third-party tags or third-party wrappers aren't allowed.
• VAST creatives hosted by third parties aren't supported. However, VAST creatives served by Campaign Manager 360 are allowed.
• VAST creatives with HTML5 companions or externally hosted media files aren't allowed.

Other considerations

• If you're targeting programmatic guaranteed or deal inventory, make sure your backup creative follows the above guidelines in order to be eligible to serve to non-personalized ad inventory.
• Search lift and brand lift experiments aren't available with non-personalized ad inventory.
• Currently, Display & Video 360 can't forecast the reach or number of impressions associated with non-personalized ad inventory.