The A-Z guide to Google Ad Manager within privacy parameters [2023]

This post was most recently updated on January 18th, 2023

The Google Ad Manager (GAM) team has been working hard on developing new features for the platform in order to provide a better user experience. This blog post will give you an overview of the new features and changes that will be available in 2023. So, whether you are a current GAM user or considering using it in the future, keep reading!

Make privacy a priority

The shift to a privacy-first future has been accelerated due to rising user privacy demands, browser operating system updates, and revised global regulations. The newly enhanced Privacy and Messaging tab will act as a single place for publishers to stay informed about relevant regulations, understand what actions they can take, message their users and navigate the advertising landscape to mitigate impact on their business.

Staying Informed about Privacy Regulations through the Privacy and Messaging Tab

GDPR and CCPA play a very important role in respecting user privacy while advertising. To help you understand how these privacy regulations may impact your business, the privacy and messaging tab includes ‘privacy regulation educational cards like shown in the above image.

Options you have for configuring your ad serving controls

You can now manage all of your privacy regulation settings in one place:

• Select the ad types that you want to show to users in that region
• Select your advertising partners
• Enable additional creative controls
• Optionally when using our GDPR messaging, add purposes for your own use. The purposes you select will appear in your GDPR messages.

The EU user ad serving controls allow you to enable serving either personalized or non-personalized ads to the users in the EEA, UK, and Brazil. Personalized ads are more relevant to your users as they are based on their latest online activity. If you’re using a GDPR message, it is mandatory to turn on personalized ads. If you don’t make any changes, personalized ads will continue to show.

Examples of Personalized ads categories include demographic targeting, interest category targeting, remarketing, targeting customer match lists, and targeting audience lists uploaded or displayed in Video 360 or campaign manager 360.

Non-personalized ads are those that are not tailored to a user based on their past behavior. They are targeted using contextual information including courses such as city-level but not zip code level, geo-targeting based on current location and content on the current site or app or current query terms.

It is also important to know that if you are gathering consent using the IAB TCF framework, any account level settings are overridden by the user’s consent decisions.

Review your Ad Partners

Select each ad partner that shows or processes ads for your site or app. How your selection will be used depends on the type of GDPR message you’ve created.

• If you’re using Google’s IAB GDPR message, your selected ad partners will get auto-populated into all your messages
• If you’re using a non-Google IAB GDPR message, your ad partner selections won’t apply.
• If you’re using a non-IAB GDPR message, your ad partner selections will be used to control which ad partners are eligible to show or process ads.

Reservation creative checking applies to reservation ad requests. Publishers can include an additional check for consent for ad partners on creatives. Any creative without an ad partner that doesn’t have valid user consent will be stopped.

RTB creative checking applies to real-time bidding ad requests when opted in RTB creative. The checking will be additionally applied to all ad requests from the EEA (European economic area), the UK, and brazil on authorized buyers and bidding demand.

When Publishers opt-in to check RTB partner creatives for user consent. 

There’s a new bid rejection reason in reporting to allow publishers to identify frequently recurring ad-tech providers that are non-consented or unknown. The primary intended action from the report is for publishers to change the list of ad-tech providers they ask the user to consent to.

A secondary action is to try and communicate with the ad technology provider associated with the bid who included the ATPs and the creative if that’s possible.

Creating and serving a GDPR message

1. Select the ‘start collecting consent for GDPR’ tab in the privacy and messaging section.
2. Click on ‘Create Message’

3. Click on ‘Select Sites’

4. Choose, add or edit a site for your GDPR message in Inventory Sites.

5. Customize the GDPR message, change the heading, font, and header as per your requirements.

6. Hit ‘publish’ once the message has been personalized. Your GDPR message will show on the Interface now.

Report on User Messages

• User messages report shows how users interact with the messages you display on your website or app.
• The metrics and data available in the User Messages report helps you understand the specific messages that are reaching your audience and the way they interact with your messages.

Other user message options

• CCPA opt-out messages for California-based users.
• IOS ATT messages to help your users understand the context for why they may opt into allowing app tracking for your app.
• Adblocking Recovery: allows you to message ad-blocking users and ask them to enable ads.

Tips on Google Ad Manager other than privacy

Saving time with Automation

For publishers, adapting to the latest Google Ad Manager (GAM) changes is just a part of the job, and this year will be no different. Making use of automation is the way to go for helping you stay ahead of competitors and save time.

Making use of features like opportunities & experiments for easy optimizations, Pubguru dashboard for instant insights, Programmatic Guaranteed for the best deals, and a lot more. You can also test manual experiments, i.e the latest means to make and run personalized experiments straight away with Google Ad Manager’s experimentation framework.

Advanced TV video streaming

As more people began digital streaming videos across a variety of devices, advanced TV video streaming grew like anything in 2021. In order to make use of advanced TV video streaming, you can use Ad Manager’s measurement and reporting features to determine the effectiveness of your video and over-the-top (OTT) campaigns.

You may also find Dynamic Ad Insertion Pod Serving helpful if you’re looking to simplify your video streaming workflow with Google’s ad decision-making technology integrated into your current GAM solution

Growing a retail media business

A recent COVID-19 pandemic accelerated growth in e-commerce and online shopping, and ad spend via google ads on retail is projected to reach more than $40 billion by 2024. A retail media business helps you better understand what your users actually want and need by converting your site traffic into insights.

For instance: Best Buy increased their conversion rates by 50% using GAM’s unique insights about their consumers. This was possible with the multi-channel campaign based on first-party data.

What has worked for other publishers

Get inspired by the success of other publishers, large and small. WeThrift, BoredPanda, and Lifehack used ads monetization to scale their ad revenue, positively impact their users and keep their content intact. Furthermore, publishers around the world are working to make the ad industry fairer for historically underrepresented groups.

Throughout the past decade, publishers around the world have shown remarkable resilience and creativity – offering quality content and places where their users can video stream, listen, and read on their websites and apps.

MonetizeMore is here to continue scaling publishers’ monetization growth in 2023. Plus, we’ll teach you all about the new features and changes to Google Ad Manager that is coming your way.

Want to get certified in Google Ad Manager? Master the fundamentals of Google Ad Manager and fully manage your ad inventory on your own today.