As partners of the Google Marketing Platform, we consistently utilize Campaign Manager 360 for tracking and analyzing our clients’ advertising campaigns. However, beyond its primary functions, Campaign Manager 360 can also serve as a powerful ad server. In this article, GMP Coordinator from newage, Maxim Shaparev, will explain what an ad server is and the advantages that Campaign Manager 360 offers in this role.

What is an Ad Server?

An ad server is software that stores advertising content for placement on publishers’ websites and other placements. It’s essentially a server that holds creatives and is responsible for displaying specific ads in response to requests from the advertising network.

For instance, let’s say we’ve arranged to place a banner on a direct publisher’s website. When a user visits the site, and they meet all the criteria we’ve set, the publisher’s site needs to display the agreed-upon banner to them. The site retrieves the banner not from its local storage but from the ad server.

A key advantage at this stage is the ability for agencies or advertisers to modify content within the ad server itself. Consider a scenario where a client announces a clearance sale, and we’ve showcased a trendy product in our creatives. However, midway through the campaign, that particular product sells out. The clearance sale continues with other items available, but it doesn’t make sense to promote the sold-out product anymore. We could ask each publisher to upload a new creative and wait until it’s ready, or we could access the ad server and replace the creative on our end, which will then be updated across all publishers. Clearly, the ad server option is more advantageous, as it avoids the need for communication with individual publishers or manual work by each advertising subcontractor. This unification allows us to make operational adjustments swiftly without wasting the client’s budget on displaying currently unavailable products.

This fundamental advantage is a core function of any ad server. Let’s provide a few examples of ad servers that advertisers commonly use.

When we launch a campaign in Google Ads, the advertising account itself acts as an ad server: you can modify the content and the substance of the ads within it, which will then be pulled to all necessary display locations. This is done without the need to individually coordinate changes with every participant in the Google Display Network.

However, convenient content management is not the only feature offered by ad servers. In this article, we’ll explore Campaign Manager 360 as an ad server: its capabilities, and the advantages it provides to users.

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Campaign Manager 360 as an Ad Server

Campaign Manager 360 is an advertising tool and part of the Google Marketing Platform ecosystem that offers additional capabilities in the realms of analytics, campaign tracking, and ad serving. To discuss CM360 as an ad server, let’s examine the campaign setup process within this service.

Creating a Campaign with a Campaign Manager

Through Campaign Manager 360, you can create, configure, and launch advertising campaigns. The interface offers the following hierarchy of advertising activities:

1. Campaign
2. Website
3. Placement
4. Ad
5. Creative

This structure adds some complexity compared to the familiar “campaign – ad group – ad” structure used in Google Ads, but it provides more opportunities for ad management.

Configuring Ad Dates in Campaign Manager 360

The first thing CM suggests defining when setting up a campaign is the ad’s display time. You specify start and end dates, and you can also set up a hard cut-off. This option allows you to stop ad displays if a placement exceeds the time frame and attempts to display your banner beyond the agreed-upon end date.

This is particularly useful for advertising various promotions, discounts, sales, and events – anything with a specific deadline. Let’s imagine you’re promoting a New Year’s concert. However, one of the placements didn’t correctly set up the banner and continues to display it. As a result, you end up with an audience who saw the ad late and couldn’t join, and you also paid for their disappointment, as the placement charged its CPM. An unpleasant situation that could have been avoided by launching the ad through Campaign Manager 360.

Campaign Schedule in Campaign Manager 360

In addition to the campaign’s overall dates, you can set up a detailed schedule for ad displays. Choose specific days of the week and times of the day when customers will see your ad. If the dates don’t align with your settings, the default creative will be displayed.

For instance, a restaurant might find it useful to display special offers on days with low table occupancy, while using a default branded creative during evenings and weekends.

Ad Types Configuration in CM360

In CM360, advertising formats can be divided into two types: tracking and non-tracking (all the rest).

Advertisers can use:

• Tracking;
• Display;
• Rich Media display banner;
• In-stream video;
• in-stream video redirect;
• in-stream audio;
• audio redirect;
• custom display;
• custom display interstitial;
• display redirect.

Tracking involves generating code to track the ad’s effectiveness. You can distribute this code to advertising placements yourself, but the creative itself is not stored in CM360 as it would be in an ad server.

In such cases, you won’t receive visibility information on creatives in CM, but you save costs on campaign organization, as you only pay for tracking.

With all other formats except tracking, you pay not only for tracking but also for using the format, and you have data on viewability and all derived metrics (viewable impressions, viewable reach, etc.). The only exception here is the display format – a simple JPEG image, with which you receive viewability without paying for the format.

Geographic Targeting Setup in Campaign Manager 360

Geotargeting might seem like a straightforward setup – a person is either in the desired location or not. However, even here, CM has managed to add more customization options.

In CM, at the ad level, you can configure the geographic display of creatives. This serves as an additional safeguard against irrelevant displays and offers extra customization possibilities.

Let’s say we’re promoting a music band’s tour, and for each city, we set up a unique creative with event details, like “Ukraine – Kyiv.” What happens if the placement where you’re displaying the ad doesn’t have precise targeting or can’t determine the user’s location? The answer is simple – such a user sees the default ad that you uploaded alongside the main one when setting up the campaign. In the case of the tour, this could be a global poster with the full schedule.

Audience Targeting Setup in Campaign Manager

CM provides access to two types of audiences:

• Custom audiences collected through Floodlight.
• Audiences from DV360.

The same principle applies here as with geotargeting: users outside the selected audiences will see standard ads instead of those selected for specific audiences. 

Keywords 

Another useful aspect is the ability to use contextual targeting via keyword fields. Advertisers can configure keywords alongside which their ads will appear. Additionally, the service offers additional settings for Brand Safety

How to Create Ads Step by Step in Campaign Manager 360

So, Campaign Manager serves as an ad server where you can store nearly unlimited images and videos. This is especially beneficial for launching ads on direct placements, as there’s no need to provide the original files to a subcontractor; instead, you can make changes to them during the campaign.

The overall step-by-step process of creating a campaign looks like this:

1. Create a campaign in the account (as a hierarchical entity).
2. Configure targeting.
3. Upload creatives to Campaign Manager (or link them from Creative Studio).
4. Load tags for use by direct placements.
5. Verify tag implementation by advertising placements.
6. The campaign is ready for display.

It’s advisable to plan your advertising campaign in advance, and create and mutually integrate the necessary assets.

In conclusion: Benefits of Using Campaign Manager as an Ad Server

1. Campaign Manager 360 can be used as an ad server, a service for managing advertising campaigns, which is particularly useful for launching ads on direct placements.
2. Thanks to CM, you can centrally manage multiple campaigns with different placements and subcontractors from a single interface.
3. Targeting settings allow you to manage ad displays and control messages that the audience receives about the advertiser.