This post was most recently updated on July 24th, 2019
As a publisher, there are few things more embarrassing than running competing ads. You don’t want to undermine your competitors’ ad campaigns, and you don’t want to send conflicting messages to your customers about your allegiances to one brand or another. It’s best to remain neutral; you should gladly run any ads that don’t cross any ethical lines, and you shouldn’t have to worry that a BMW ad is running alongside a Mercedes-Benz ad on your site.
Fortunately, DoubleClick for Publishers allows you to apply competitive exclusion labels for advertisers, orders, or line items. These exclusion labels allow you to specifically prevent competitive ads from appearing on your pages. You can only apply labels to advertisers, house advertisers, or ad networks, and you can’t apply labels to agencies or house agencies. When you apply a label to an advertiser, you prevent multiple line times from the same advertiser from appearing on the same page. You can make an exception and allow multiple line items from the same advertiser to appear on the same page and to the same user.
To prevent competitively labeled items from delivering together, first create a label. Enter a name for the label. Make sure the name is memorable. Then click “Save”.
Apply this label to all companies, orders, and line items you want to protect from competing with one another. However, you can allow advertisers to run multiple ads on one page, by selecting Allow same advertiser exception in the label settings.
Once you’ve set up your labels, disable individual labels that might compete with one another. You don’t have to remove it from all the line items, orders, or advertisers. You can just disable the label. To do so, click “Disable” under Labels > Admin.
This is just one of many ways to keep your advertisers happy they advertise on your site. Contact us today to learn more about how we can employ similar tweaks to increase your revenue by 25-50%.
Kean Graham is the CEO and founder of MonetizeMore & a pioneer in the Adtech Industry. He is the resident expert in Ad Optimization, covering areas like Adsense Optimization,GAM Management, and third-party ad network partnerships. Kean believes in the supremacy of direct publisher deals and holistic optimization as keys to effective and consistent ad revenue increases.