Real-Time Targeting

Resolving audiences to site and application visitors in real-time

Your DCN can resolve audience memberships to visitors of your sites and applications in real-time. This is particularly useful if you're a publisher and are looking to target ads to the audiences configured or matched in your DCN.

You can activate an audience from the DCN UI by navigating to the audience's Activation tab and turning the activation switch to the on position.

SDK Targeting API

Integrating the Optable SDKs on your sites and applications enables you to call the SDK targeting API which triggers real-time calls to your DCN requesting matching of activated audiences. If the site visitor or application user triggering the SDK targeting call is a member of an activated audience, that audience's activation keyword is returned and can be subsequently relayed to your ad server or exchange for ad targeting.

To learn about the web SDK targeting API refer to this section in the GitHub README. Details on integrating with Google Ad Manager specifically can be found further below as well as in this section of the GitHub README.

You can see an example of the web SDK integrated with a GAM account for targeting on demo.optable.co

Google Ad Manager Integration

Optionally, you can link your DCN to your Google Ad Manager account by navigating to the Admin > General tab in your DCN UI, and clicking on "Setup" next to Google Ad Manager. Follow the on-screen steps to continue.

During setup, we recommend giving your service account the 'Administrator' (Ad Manager Only) role, but if your organization has more strict permissioning rules, the minimum permissions required to enable key-value syncing are:

  • View ad units, placements, and labels

  • Edit ad units, placements, and key-values

  • Edit key-values values

Once successfully linked, your DCN will automatically create a key in GAM, with the name specified in the Key Name setting of your DCNs Admin settings. (the default is "optable")

Now that Google Ad Manager is configured, when you enable Real Time Targeting for a given audience and click save, your DCN will create a value associated to the activated audience, under the key name you set in Admin -> General.

The created value will be equal to the Keyword displayed in the Activation tab of the audience in your DCN UI, and the description associated with the created value in GAM will be equal to the name of your audience as configured in your DCN.

Example of the activation tab of an audience.

You can then target line items in your Google Ad Manager account using the key-value associated with audiences that you've activated and synced.

Note that your DCN will not delete key values it has created for activated audiences, even when you archive them. This is because GAM defaults to ignoring deleted key values when evaluating targeting, which means that if you have running line items targeting deleted key values they may end up inadvertently targeting everyone.

As a result, any line items that you have configured to target archived audiences should stop matching users and delivering.

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