To inform your decision making about where to show ads on you website or app, you'll want to understand and plan the structure of your inventory.
Jump to a section of the article:
- Planning your structure
- Example: Planning the structure of a news website
- More about using ad units, placements, and key-values
- Other resources
- Next steps
Planning your structure
Before creating ad units, placements, or anything else, you can do some planning outside of Ad Manager. Outline where you want ads to show and what kind of ads you plan to show in those spaces. Your website or app, along with your ad inventory, are likely to evolve over time. Therefore, such planning is an ongoing process. You should regularly audit your digital properties and how you've structured your ad inventory to ensure you're making the most of them.
To help you start your planning process, review the following example about a news website.
Example: Planning the structure of a news website
Suppose you own and operate a news website that covers national and local news. Take a look at these sample planning questions, and some of the options you can consider.
View sample planning questions
How might I plan my inventory for a news website with national and local sections?
- If you plan on selling to advertisers who want to display on specific local news sections, but not on the national news section, you might need to create separate ad units for each local section.
- If you don't plan to sell the local section separately, you can use one ad unit for both national and local news sections.
- You might alternately create separate ad units for each local section, and then use placements to group those local section ad units into national section placements.
How might I organize two 300x250 ad slots on the local news section (one at the top of the page and one at the bottom)?
- You might use different ad units for each slot, or you might use key-values to differentiate between slots.
How might I use targeting with this structure?
In the sample structure shown in the table, you can deliver an ad to:
- Key-value: Position is Leaderboard (pos=leaderboard)
- Key-value: Position is Top Box (pos=atf-box)
- Key-value: Position is Bottom Box (pos=btf-box)
- Key-value: Position is Leaderboard (pos=leaderboard)
- Key-value: Position is Top Box (pos=atf-box)
- Key-value: Position is Bottom Box (pos=btf-box)
- Key-value: Position is Leaderboard (pos=leaderboard)
- Key-value: Position is Top Box (pos=atf-box)
- Key-value: Position is Bottom Box (pos=btf-box)
- Placement: A national news section placement groups together the local news sections for targeting.
- Ad units: The local news section ad units are the basic components.
- Key-values: Key-values define the individual ad slots within each local news section.
More about using ad units, placements, and key-values
Your inventory is a combination of ad units, placements, and key-values, which allows you to target horizontally across your content. The examples below show how you might use ad units, key-values, and system-defined criteria to meet inventory requirements.
| What you want to do | What you should use |
|---|---|
| Target an ad to specific section of your content | Ad units |
| Easily target an ad to all of your sports subsections | Ad units, which provide "flow-down" targeting |
| Exclude your app inventory from run-of-network ads | Special ad units
: Mark your app inventory as special ad units Only available in Google Ad Manager 360.
|
| Easily target all of your sports, finance, and weather landing pages | Placements: Combine all of your landing pages in a placement |
| Target an ad to a specific gender anywhere on your content | Key-values, which provide horizontal targeting (for example, gender=female
) |
| Target an ad to a specific sports team anywhere on your website. | Key-values, which provide horizontal targeting (for example, team=yankees
). |
| Target an ad to your visitors that are based in Canada. | Geography, which is a system-defined criterion that’s handled for you |
| Target an ad to Android users only | Operating system (including mobile), which is a system-defined criterion that’s handled for you |
Other resources
Partner with a trusted expert: If you're looking for assistance to get your account up and running, consider working with one of our Google Certified Publishing Partners .
E-learning: Check out the Skillshop e-learning course designed to help you with this topic.
Next steps in inventory setup
Now that you’ve planned your inventory structure, you can move on to these next steps:
