Protections help you manage your brand, avoid competing advertisers' ads from appearing together, and determine which inventory (if any) you want to make available to the Open Auction. There are 4 types of Protections that include Ad content, Competition, Inventory exclusion, and Manual creative review.
There are also network level controls that let you opt in or out of Google Demand sources, including the Google Display Network (GDN) and Display & Video 360.
Good to know about Protections
- Protection rules are additive. Protection rules that satisfy the targeting of an ad request apply to that ad request, and more than one rule may apply to the same ad request.
- If there are multiple protection rules, the more restrictive of the overlapping protection-level settings is always applied.
- There are also limits to the number of Protection rules and values you can include in certain rules. Learn more about Protection limits.
- Protections change history is only available in the "Admin" change history section when filtering by the protection type.
On this page
- Ad content
- Competition
- Inventory exclusions
- Manual creative review (Beta)
- Network level
- Best practices with geographic targeting
Ad content
Ad content rules help ensure that only the kinds of ads you want will appear on your digital properties. These rules protect you, your users, and your advertisers.
You manage the brand of your websites or apps with targeting, blocks, or opt-ins for certain types of ads.
If you apply multiple protections, your traffic may be limited, as more than one rule may apply to the same ad request. When there are multiple protection rules, the more restrictive of the overlapping protection-level settings is always applied.
You decide to opt in to alcohol ads. Then, you decide to block all buyers except Advertiser A, Advertiser B, and Advertiser C. Regardless of your opt-in, the only traffic you will receive is from Advertiser A, Advertiser B, and Advertiser C. All other traffic will be blocked.
Targeting
"Ad content" rules apply to all inventory under several scenarios:
- If the option Protect all inventory is selected
- If Only protect specified inventory is selected and no targeting is specified
- If Only protect specified inventory is selected and you've included a targeting type but didn't include a targeting class or targeting value
To restrict a rule to specific inventory, ensure that Only protect specified inventory is selected and that you've added targeting—either a targeting class or targeting value.
- Select Only protect specified inventory.
- Click Add targeting.
- From the menu, select a targeting type.
- Click the targeting type and add a targeting class or targeting value.
- Click Save.
Day-time targeting
Set time-based ad restrictions to run only during specific hours or days. For example, you might set ad restrictions to run only on Tuesdays, or from 3 to 6 PM daily.
- Under "Day-time targeting," select Set days and times, and set the desired options.
- Select "Publisher's time zone" or "User's time zone".
Publisher time zone is based on the network time zone set when your Ad Manager network was created. Ensure you follow best practices if you're also applying geographic targeting to ad restrictions. - To set an active time range for certain days: Select a “Start time” and “End time” and then select the days when the time range will apply.
- To exclude certain days of the week: Select the days and then select Don’t run on these days.
- (Optional) Click Add time period to include an additional time period. Repeat steps a - c.
- Select "Publisher's time zone" or "User's time zone".
- Click Save.
Blocks
These types of ads are allowed by default and can serve if no restriction is applied via "Blocks." You opt to block ads from the following categories or sources.
- Ad experiences: Controls what kinds of ad behavior are eligible for your digital properties.
- Advertisers/Brands: Brands are children that are mapped to parent advertisers, such as a food company (the advertiser, parent) and a specific cereal they manufacture (the brand, child).
- General categories: High-level groupings of ads, such as apparel, finance, and health.
- Sensitive categories: Groups of ads that are considered "sensitive" due to the nature of the business or ad, such as "Sensationalism" or "Significant Skin Exposure."
- Buyers: Prevent specific buyers from showing ads on your site or app.
- Custom labels: Used to group objects for a variety of purposes. For example, you can create a custom label and then block it to prevent competing ads from appearing on the same page. Note that this is the only blocking option supported for YouTube cross-sell networks.
- Advertiser URLs: Ads that link (or click-through) to specific URLs or app downloads. This way, you can easily block all ads that are linked to your competitor at
www.example.com. - Cookies and data uses (non-Google demand): Block other buyers from showing ads based on user interest categories or remarketing.
Opt-ins
Ads from the following categories or sources are blocked by default. You can choose to allow them.
- Ad experiences: Controls what kinds of ad behavior are eligible for your digital properties—in this case, video ads that have unknown ad behavior or that meet the minimum threshold to transact programmatically but don't fully comply with all of our ad policies.
- Restricted categories: Allow ads for alcohol and gambling/betting to appear, unless the categories have been disabled from your network.
- Ad technologies: Control which ad technologies and video types are allowed on your inventory. Authorized Buyers are allowed to use many ad technology vendors that use tools such as ad servers, research technologies, and remarketing.
Competition
Competition rules stop ads from advertisers in the same or similar market from appearing together. Setting up these kinds of rules allows you to add value to your advertisers by ensuring they won't compete for the same users during an ad experience.
Learn more about preventing competitors from serving together.
Inventory exclusions
Inventory exclusions indicate what inventory to exclude from the Open Auction. Inventory exclusion rules allow you to exclude inventory types or targeting values.
Learn more about inventory exclusion rules under Protections.
Targeting values
The targeting values included in an inventory exclusion rule are blocked from the Open Auction. If no targeting values are included in the targeting picker, then all inventory is blocked from the Open Auction.
- Add targeting values to the targeting picker to ensure you're not excluding all inventory from the Open Auction.
- If you want to include all inventory in the Open Auction, simply don't add any inventory exclusion rules.
- Special ad units are treated as regular ad units when applying targeting to pricing rules, protections, video settings, Private Auctions, and Ad Exchange direct tags.
If you include an ad unit in a blocking rule and it contains special child ad units, those ad units will also be included in the blocking rule despite not being explicitly targeted.
Manual creative review (Beta)
You can set a manual creative review protection to block any unreviewed creatives from serving until you review them in the Ad Review Center.
This functionality might be important to publishers that are required by industry or company regulations to review creatives prior to serving, or that have higher standards for certain parts of their inventory, such as for live content, child content, and so on.
Manual creative review protections apply to Private Auction, Marketplace package, and Open Auction inventory.
Any creative that fits the targeting expression set within the Protection is automatically blocked and tagged with the status "Pending" in the Ad Review Center. Publishers can leverage the "Pending" status as a queue for creatives that are blocked by the protection.
Creatives that don’t fit the targeting expression of the protection will continue to serve regularly, unless they’re explicitly blocked in the Ad Review Center. Such creatives are marked "Serving" by default. For more details on manual creative review, visit Review and block ads.
Note: Manual creative review doesn't currently support selecting the "Games" inventory type. However, games inventory is included in the "Video" and run-of-network "Apply to all inventory" options.
Network level
By default, Google Demand sources, including the Google Display Network (GDN) and Display & Video 360, are allowed to show ads based on user interest categories and remarketing. This feature also allows the use of non-signed in visitation information from sites to help create interest categories.
On a network level, you can choose to opt out of either interest-based category ads (for non-signed in users) or remarketing ads. Learn more about blocking ads by user-based data.
Best practices with geographic targeting
If a restriction targets specific geographic locations, particularly places outside your network's normal traffic, best practice suggests that you should select the Publisher's time zone. Pacing doesn’t take into account geographic targeting and, as a result, you may experience unexpected delivery issues.
Convert your publisher time zone to the desired time for the location you're targeting.
Example
- The publisher time zone is set to "America/New York" (Eastern Time).
- You apply geographic targeting for California to a restriction, which is located in the Pacific time zone—a three-hour difference from New York.
- You want to serve ads to California users between 6 PM and 8 PM in the Pacific time zone.
In this scenario:
- Select Publisher's time zone.
- Set the start time to 9 PM and the end time to 11 PM.
This is equivalent to 6 PM and 8 PM in the Pacific time zone. - Under “Repeating on,” select Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, and Sat.