Ad Targeting through Google Ad Manager

What does ad targeting do?

Ad targeting allows you to serve ads based on content, platform, geography and other parameters. To learn more about how Google Ad Manager targeting works, please refer here.


How does ad targeting work?

When a user selects a video to watch within your service, any ad metadata associated with it is sent to Google Ad Manager. Google Ad Manager then reviews this information to determine which ad it should display based on the video selected. 

You can configure ad targeting to specific videos by using the Ad Words field within your CMS. This is only available on an individual-video level and cannot be set across an entire collection. To enabling ad targeting, you will need to complete two steps in two separate locations:

  1. Within your Vimeo OTT CMS - by setting up metadata for the video content that will have ad targeting
  2. Within Google Ad Manager - by setting up the targeting rules


How to enable ad targeting within the Vimeo OTT CMS

Step 1

Within your Vimeo OTT CMS, you will need to navigate to the 'Ad Words' section of the video you intend to have targeted. To do this:

  1. Select your video from your content list within the CMS
  2. Navigate to the 'Distribution' section
  3. Scroll down the 'Distribution' page or select 'Ad Words' from the left-hand menu - either option will get you where you want to be!

For this example, we will use a key of "test" for ad targeting. The values that we will use or this key are `value1' and 'value2' to target ads. For your service, you can use any word for your "key" and "value" descriptors. You will need to set-up one or more videos within your CMS with the correct key and value pair as shown below.

Step 2

Then, within Google Ad Manager, you will navigate to Inventory-> Key-values, select New key-value.

  • Set the name and display name to the key
  • Ensure value type is set to dynamic
  • In Targeting Values, select New Values and add the values

Next, we need to create/edit Orders and line items for each type of content that we wish to target

  • To learn how to set up an order see here
  • For the purposes of targeting, we will add specific targeting rules against the Line item as follows:
    • Edit the line item, and scroll down to the Add Targeting section
    • Under Custom targeting, select the Key and the value
    • Click Save to save changes to the Line item

Finally,

  • Repeat the steps above to create an Order and Line Item for other target types.
  • Next, construct an ad tag
  • Add “&ad_rule=1” the end of the ad tag, to force GAM to serve ads using ad rules.
  • Copy the new ad tag into the Pricing > Advertisements block of the Subscription Product within the CMS

How does targeting work?

When a video is played back by the Vimeo OTT Video player, any ad metadata associated with the video are automatically sent to the ad manager as part of the ad request. The ad manager can use this info to determine what type of ad it should target based on the ad metadata.