[Ad Ops Guru] — How to Prioritize GAM Campaigns to Specific Mid-Roll Cue Points

Publishers often come to our team with various questions on ad ops and ad optimization. Just the other day, one of our clients asked me an interesting question: “Is there a way to set up a campaign in GAM to appear in a specific mid-roll ad slot?” 

The short answer is yes. There’s a way to prioritize a campaign for a specific cue point from within Google Ad Manager.

Doing that allows publishers to prioritize their campaigns with higher CPMs to show up earlier during a video to boost revenue.

However, this question got me thinking — what if there are more publishers wondering the same thing? 

That’s why I figured I should write a short guide on this, as it can be a useful tool for any publisher monetizing with mid-rolls.

Here’s what you should do to prioritize GAM campaigns to specific mid-roll cue points.

Line Item Setup

If you want to force a specific GAM campaign to always display at a particular mid-roll cue point while using a single exported GAM tag, you can do that with a simple line item setup. 

The easiest way to illustrate this is on a concrete example.

Let’s say your video has five mid-roll ad slots (Mid-Roll 1, Mid-Roll 2, Mid-Roll 3, Mid-Roll 4, Mid-Roll 5), and you have two different campaigns (Campaign 1, Campaign 2). If you want to give your first campaign (Campaign 1) priority over the first mid-roll slot (Mid-Roll 1), you’ll need to do the following:

1. Target your first campaign (Campaign 1) to the first mid-roll ad slot (Mid-Roll 1) like this: 

Video position > Any mid-roll > Mid-Roll 1 

2. Target your second campaign (Campaign 2) to all other mid-roll positions, except Mid-Roll 1 (Mid-Roll 2, Mid-Roll 3, Mid-Roll 4, Mid-Roll 5).

3. You can do this regardless of how many campaigns or mid-roll slots you have. You just have to ensure your preferred campaign is only targeting the specific ad slot you want to prioritize and that no other campaigns are targeted to that slot.

Ad Rule Setup

If you want to use the above configuration, you’ll first need to set up an ad rule for your Mid-Rolls. Here’s how you should set up your ad rule:

Video mid-rolls > Enable > At fixed times > [Seconds when mid-rolls should start, separated by a comma]

Once you configure this ruling, all you need to do is set up your targeting at the bottom of the page.

In this specific case, we set up an ad rule for mid-rolls that tells the player to show a mid-roll on the 3rd and 6th seconds of a video. That means we want to prioritize Campaign 1 for the 3rd-second position and leave the other campaigns (in this case, Campaign 2) to the other available ones. This setup will work with any number of cue points, but for simplicity’s sake, we used only two in this example (3rd- and 6th-second mid-rolls).

VAST Tag Export

When exporting your Google Publisher Tag for Video and Audio, you’ll need to include the following parameters:

• &ad_rule=1
• &vid_d=90000 (the value will depend on the duration of your video)
• &allcues=3,6 (the seconds previously set in the “Ad Rule” section)Ad Tag Sample 

Configuring the Ad Tag in the TargetVideo CMS

If you’re using the above tag with the TargetVideo player, there are a few things you should know about setting it up:

1. Insert the tag in a pre-roll ad slot through the TargetVideo CMS, not a mid-roll — Since the above tag will have a VMAP response, it’s better for the TargetVideo player to receive it sooner than later. This setup will not show an ad in the pre-roll slot unless your specific VMAP has an ad rule that it returns pre-rolls.
2. Set up Google IMA SDK as your ad parser of choice — This will allow you to fully utilize VMAP ad tags and ad rules (including the above mid-roll priority configuration)

I hope you found these tips useful. If you need any additional help optimizing your ads or need guidance from one of our experts, get in touch, and let us take a look at your ad stack.

Until next time!