Ad Manager set-up for header bidding

0:00Welcome, outcomes and key terms

Play from 0:00 On Monday, your team adds a fifth bidder to Prebid. By Friday, Prebid says that bidder won about one auction in six (illustrative).

Play from 0:18 Ad Manager says it served zero impressions. Not a few. Zero.

Play from 0:28 Nothing is broken in the browser. The cause is one key name, cut short at twenty characters, so no line item ever matched it.

Play from 0:32 This module is about building the Ad Manager side so that never happens to you. Welcome to Module 5 of the RediAds Academy Header Bidding Masterclass: Ad Manager set-up for header bidding.

Play from 0:38 By the end of this module, you'll be able to do four things.

Play from 0:42 Build a clean Ad Manager structure for Prebid: ad units, orders, line items and creatives.

Play from 0:50 Design key-values that work for one bidder or for twelve, inside Ad Manager's limits.

Play from 0:57 Choose a price granularity with real maths, and check it against live bids.

Play from 1:02 And plan your line item count before you build a single one.

Play from 1:08 Eight terms first. They all come back with examples.

Play from 1:12 An ad unit is a named place for ads in your Ad Manager inventory. An order is a folder of line items. A line item is a rule that can win an impression. Price priority is the line item type Prebid uses, where the highest price wins.

Play from 1:31 A key-value is a label on the ad request that line items can target. A key can be predefined, with its values listed in advance, or dynamic, accepting any value. hb_pb is the key that carries the price bucket. And price granularity is the set of buckets that bids are rounded into.

Play from 1:55 Here's where we are. Modules one to four built the auction, in the browser and on the server.

Play from 2:13 Modules five and six are the ad server. Every bid from the first four modules ends up in Ad Manager, and either competes at its real value or quietly leaks.

Play from 2:22 Module five is the set-up. Module six is creatives, floors and yield.

Play from 2:27 If you already traffic Prebid line items every week, you can skip to chapter three, the granularity maths. It's the part most set-ups get slightly wrong.

2:32The Ad Manager blueprint

Play from 2:33 Chapter one. Before any bid can compete, Ad Manager needs a structure to receive it. Let's draw that blueprint.

Play from 2:43 Every ad slot on your page has three names, and they must agree.

Play from 2:48 First, the Ad Manager ad unit path. Something like slash one two three four, slash home underscore top.

Play from 2:56 Second, the div ID on the page, which Google Publisher Tag uses to place the ad.

Play from 3:03 Third, the ad unit code in your Prebid configuration.

Play from 3:07 By default, Prebid attaches its winning bid to the slot whose div ID matches its ad unit code. If those two don't match, the auction runs perfectly, and the bid never arrives.

Play from 3:21 Now the inventory. Start with your network at the top.

Play from 3:26 Split it into sections that matter for selling and reporting, like the homepage and article pages.

Play from 3:32 Then create one ad unit per position: the top banner, the in-article box, the mobile sticky.

Play from 3:40 Split by position, not by page. Positions earn differently, so you'll want to price and report on them separately.

Play from 3:48 And list only the sizes that really fit each slot. Every extra size is extra trafficking.

Play from 3:58 Let's make that concrete with our demo site, The Monsoon Times. Illustrative.

Play from 4:03 The network sits at the top, with two sections underneath: home, and article.

Play from 4:09 Under each section, three positions. A top banner, a mid-page box, and a mobile sticky.

Play from 4:16 Each position lists only its real sizes. The mid-page box takes three hundred by two fifty, and nothing else.

Play from 4:24 That's six ad units in all. Small enough to understand at a glance, and detailed enough to price each position on its own.

Play from 4:34 Inside Ad Manager, Prebid demand sits in four levels.

Play from 4:38 At the top, an advertiser, usually just called Prebid. Some teams create one advertiser per bidder instead, which makes reports easier to read.

Play from 4:48 Under it, orders. An order is a container, for example Prebid, banner, number one.

Play from 4:56 Inside each order, line items: one for every price bucket.

Play from 5:01 And attached to each line item, the creatives that actually render the ad.

Play from 5:06 One hard limit to plan around: Ad Manager allows four hundred and fifty line items per order. Bigger set-ups need several orders.

Play from 5:16 Here's how Ad Manager ranks demand, from the top down.

Play from 5:21 Sponsorships and standard direct deals come first. They're the campaigns you've sold.

Play from 5:27 Below them sit the remnant line items. Your Prebid line items live here, as price priority.

Play from 5:34 At this level, Google's own demand, Ad Exchange and AdSense, competes on price as well.

Play from 5:41 House ads sit at the bottom, as the last fallback.

Play from 5:45 The key point: inside price priority there's no queue. The highest price wins. So the price on your Prebid line item matters enormously.

Play from 5:57 So why does Prebid need a whole ladder of line items?

Play from 6:01 Each rung is one line item. It targets a single hb_pb value, and its rate is set to that same value.

Play from 6:10 When a bid arrives with hb_pb equal to two point three zero, only the two-thirty rung matches.

Play from 6:18 Its rate, two dollars thirty, is the price Ad Manager uses to compare it with Ad Exchange and everything else.

Play from 6:26 Ad Manager never sees the real bid. It sees the rung. No rung, no competition. That's the whole reason the ladder exists.

Play from 6:37 Each line item needs creatives. There are two common ways to size them.

Play from 6:43 Option one: a one-by-one creative. Prebid's creative then resizes the frame using the hb_size value. It's the simplest set-up.

Play from 6:54 Option two: creatives at your real sizes, like three hundred by two fifty. Reporting is more precise, but you'll manage many more creatives.

Play from 7:04 Either way, make copies. Ad Manager shows only one creative per line item per page.

Play from 7:10 So if three slots on a page could all win at the two-thirty rung, that line item needs three creative copies.

Play from 7:19 Here are the settings that matter on every Prebid line item.

Play from 7:23 Type: price priority. Rate: the bucket value, for example two dollars thirty. Targeting: hb_pb is two point three zero. Sizes: every size your Prebid slots use. Creatives: display one or more, and rotate evenly. Dates: start immediately, and no end date.

Play from 7:38 Get these right once, and every other rung is a copy with a new price.

Play from 7:54 Three blueprint mistakes we see again and again.

Play from 7:58 One: the Prebid code matches the Ad Manager ad unit name, not the div ID. Bids are made, and none of them arrive.

Play from 8:08 Two: the ladder built with the wrong line item type. Prebid rungs belong at price priority, where price decides. At other levels, other rules decide, and the bid stops competing on price alone.

Play from 8:22 Three: a rate that doesn't match its rung. A two-thirty line item with a rate of two dollars competes at two dollars, every single time.

8:33Key-values: the bid's passport

Play from 8:33 Chapter two. Ad Manager never sees Prebid's bid object. It only sees labels on the ad request, called key-values. So they're the only way a bid can tell Ad Manager anything at all.

Play from 8:49 Prebid sets five main keys on each slot. Each one has a different job.

Play from 8:54 hb_pb is the price bucket. It's the key your line items target.

Play from 9:01 hb_bidder says who won. You'll mostly use it for reporting.

Play from 9:06 hb_adid is the ID of the winning bid. The creative uses it to find the right ad.

Play from 9:14 hb_size is the size of the winning creative.

Play from 9:19 And hb_format says banner, video or native, so each format can have its own line items.

Play from 9:27 Newer Prebid versions add one more, hb_ver, which helps the creative load the matching renderer version. You'll meet it in Module 6.

Play from 9:38 Let's follow those keys through one request.

Play from 9:41 Prebid finishes its auction and sets the keys on the slot.

Play from 9:46 Google Publisher Tag sends them to Ad Manager inside the ad request.

Play from 9:51 Ad Manager finds the line item that targets this exact hb_pb value, and checks its rate against everything else.

Play from 10:00 If that line item wins, its creative reads hb_adid and renders the matching bid. Four steps, and the keys carry the bid through every one.

Play from 10:13 Key-values can sit at two levels, and it helps to know which is which.

Play from 10:18 Page-level keys describe the whole page. Your section, your article ID, your test labels.

Play from 10:25 Slot-level keys describe one slot. Prebid's keys are slot-level, because each slot has its own auction and its own winner.

Play from 10:35 When you debug, look at both lists. Google's Publisher Console shows them side by side, as you'll see in the demo.

Play from 10:43 That third step hides a classic mistake. Ad Manager matches values as text, character for character.

Play from 10:51 Prebid sends hb_pb with two decimal places. Two point three zero.

Play from 10:58 A line item that targets two point three zero matches.

Play from 11:02 A line item that targets two point three, without the zero, never matches. The bid arrives, finds no rung, and simply can't compete.

Play from 11:12 So copy the exact format Prebid sends. Then check a few rungs against a live request before launch. You'll see how in the demo.

Play from 11:22 In Ad Manager, you create each key as either predefined or dynamic.

Play from 11:27 A predefined key has its values listed in advance. That suits hb_pb, hb_bidder, hb_size and hb_format, because you know every possible value.

Play from 11:44 A dynamic key accepts any value without a list. That suits hb_adid, which is a fresh random ID on every bid. You never target it. It just travels with the request until the creative needs it.

Play from 12:01 Two size limits: key names stop at twenty characters, and values at forty.

Play from 12:08 Ad Manager also limits the network as a whole.

Play from 12:12 Two hundred active keys per network, predefined and dynamic together.

Play from 12:18 One hundred thousand active values per key.

Play from 12:21 Two hundred keys sounds like plenty. But your editorial team's keys, like section or article ID, share that same budget. In chapter four, you'll see how fast Prebid can use it up.

Play from 12:36 Key-values aren't only for targeting. They're also one of your best reporting tools.

Play from 12:47 Here's an illustrative share of Prebid wins by hb_bidder. Sovrn, RediAds, OpenX, and Index Exchange.

Play from 12:52 A report like this shows which partners actually win, not just which ones bid.

Play from 12:57 Two catches. First, a key only appears in reports from the day you turn on reporting for it. There's no backfill.

Play from 13:06 Second, values that aren't defined in Ad Manager don't appear in reports, even when the key is reportable. That's one more reason to make hb_bidder predefined.

Play from 13:19 Three key-value mistakes we see.

Play from 13:22 One: rungs typed as two point three, or two point three zero zero. Close is not a match.

Play from 13:30 Two: reporting switched on after launch. Then the first month's revenue meeting has no bidder split to look at.

Play from 13:38 Three: hb_adid created as a predefined key. It can't work, because its values are random. Make it dynamic.

Play from 13:50 Let's check what Ad Manager will really receive. Four test bids are on this page, and the best is two dollars thirty-seven.

Play from 14:38 First, Prebid's own view. I'll ask for the targeting it set on our slot. There's hb_pb: two point three zero, not two thirty-seven. That's medium granularity rounding down, and it's the number your ladder must match.

Play from 15:02 Now the same question to Google Publisher Tag. Same keys, same values, sitting on the slot. Notice the bidder-specific keys too, like hb_pb underscore sovrn. That's send all bids, and it's chapter four's topic.

Play from 15:15 Prebid and GPT agree. But the best witness is Google's own tool, the Publisher Console. Any page with GPT can open it, with one command.

Play from 15:21 Here it is, with a card for our slot. Its ad unit path, its div ID, and the line item and creative that served.

Play from 15:24 I'll open the targeting info. This list is what left the page. hb_ver, hb_pb, hb_bidder, and each bidder's own set. If a key isn't on this list, no line item anywhere can target it.

Play from 15:25 One honest note. The line item that served here is Google's public sample, not a Prebid rung. This demo network has no Prebid ladder. On your own site, a Prebid win would show your rung's line item ID right here. That's how you check a rung against a live request before launch.

15:27Price granularity, with the maths

Play from 15:27 Chapter three. Price granularity decides how much of each bid's value reaches Ad Manager. Let's do the maths properly.

Play from 15:38 Granularity is a trade-off with two failure modes.

Play from 15:42 Too coarse, and you lose value. With fifty-cent buckets, a two dollar thirty-seven bid reaches Ad Manager as two dollars. Ad Exchange only has to beat two dollars.

Play from 15:54 Too fine, and you drown in line items. One-cent buckets up to twenty dollars means two thousand line items, for one set of keys.

Play from 16:04 Your job is the middle: fine where your bids actually land, coarser where they rarely do.

Play from 16:12 Prebid ships five built-in granularities. One at a time.

Play from 16:17 Low: fifty-cent steps, capped at five dollars.

Play from 16:22 Medium: ten-cent steps, capped at twenty. This is Prebid's default.

Play from 16:27 High: one-cent steps, also capped at twenty.

Play from 16:31 Auto: five cents up to five dollars, ten cents up to ten, then fifty cents up to twenty.

Play from 16:39 Dense: one cent up to three dollars, five cents up to eight, then fifty cents up to twenty.

Play from 16:47 Two rules decide every hb_pb value.

Play from 16:52 Rule one: Prebid rounds down to the step below. So the ad server never believes a bid is higher than it really is.

Play from 17:00 Rule two: above the cap, everything is flattened. A twenty-four dollar bid on medium arrives as twenty point zero zero.

Play from 17:09 Rounding changes only the ad server auction. The bidder is still paid by its own auction rules, not by your bucket.

Play from 17:19 Here's the worked example. Six bids down the side, five granularities across the top. Every cell is the hb_pb value Ad Manager would see. We checked each one on a live Prebid page.

Play from 17:34 Eighty-seven cents. Low says fifty cents. Medium, eighty. Auto, eighty-five. Dense and high keep the full eighty-seven.

Play from 17:44 Two thirty-seven. Low, two dollars. Medium, two thirty. Auto, two thirty-five. Dense and high, two thirty-seven.

Play from 17:53 Three forty-eight. Low, three. Medium, three forty. Auto and dense, three forty-five. Only high keeps three forty-eight.

Play from 18:03 Six forty-three. Low hits its cap at five. Medium, auto and dense show six forty. Only high keeps six forty-three.

Play from 18:13 Twelve seventy-six. Medium keeps twelve seventy. Auto and dense drop to twelve fifty, because of their fifty-cent steps above the middle.

Play from 18:22 And twenty-four ten. Every option flattens it. Low to five, the rest to twenty.

Play from 18:30 Three patterns jump out.

Play from 18:32 Dense matches high below three dollars. That's where many display bids land.

Play from 18:38 Above ten dollars, auto and dense lose more than medium. Twelve seventy-six loses twenty-six cents on dense, but only six on medium.

Play from 18:48 And the cap hurts most of all. Twenty-four ten on low arrives as five dollars. That bid now competes as a five-dollar impression.

Play from 19:00 Now the cost side. How many rungs does each option need, for one set of keys?

Play from 19:06 Low needs ten. Auto, one hundred and seventy. Medium, two hundred. Dense, four hundred and twenty-four. High, two thousand.

Play from 19:17 Prebid's own docs quote one more for each, like two hundred and one. That extra rung is for a zero bucket. Bids below the first step round down to zero point zero zero.

Play from 19:30 Notice dense fits under four hundred and fifty, in a single order. High needs five orders, for one set of keys.

Play from 19:40 Here's a useful piece of maths. If bids spread evenly within a step, the average rounding gap is half a step.

Play from 19:48 Ten-cent steps: about five cents of gap per bid, on average.

Play from 19:53 One-cent steps: about half a cent.

Play from 19:56 On a two-dollar bid, five cents is two and a half percent of the price Ad Exchange has to beat. Illustrative maths, assuming an even spread.

Play from 20:06 That's the real cost of a coarse step. Not money taken from the bid, but a lower bar for the competition. Module 6 shows exactly when that bar costs you an impression.

Play from 20:20 If no built-in option fits your traffic, define your own buckets.

Play from 20:25 Start with a histogram of your bids. Prebid's docs suggest setting the cap near your ninety-fifth percentile bid.

Play from 20:33 Here's an illustrative set. Five-cent steps up to five dollars, where most bids land.

Play from 20:39 Then ten-cent steps up to ten, and one-dollar steps up to thirty.

Play from 20:44 The last max becomes your cap. Bids above thirty dollars arrive as thirty point zero zero.

Play from 20:52 Add up the steps. One hundred, plus fifty, plus twenty. One hundred and seventy rungs, and your ladder must mirror them exactly.

Play from 21:04 Different formats often need different buckets.

Play from 21:07 Video bids usually run higher than banner bids. A twenty-dollar cap can flatten too many of them.

Play from 21:14 Prebid lets you set a granularity per media type. That setting takes priority over the general one.

Play from 21:21 So banner can stay on auto while video gets its own custom ladder. Each format then needs its own set of rungs, targeted with hb_format.

Play from 21:34 Halfway check. Pause the video if you'd like to work it out.

Play from 21:41 A bid of three dollars forty-eight arrives, and you're using auto granularity. What does Ad Manager see in hb_pb?

Play from 21:48 Three point four five. Under five dollars, auto uses five-cent steps, and Prebid rounds down to the step below. Not three fifty, and not the exact bid.

Play from 22:02 One more case, very common in India. Your Ad Manager network reports in rupees, not dollars.

Play from 22:10 Prebid's Currency module converts each bid into your ad server currency.

Play from 22:15 Its granularity multiplier scales the built-in buckets to fit. With a multiplier of one hundred, medium becomes ten-rupee steps, capped at two thousand rupees. Illustrative choice of multiplier.

Play from 22:29 The multiplier doesn't need to equal the exchange rate. A round number gives tidy buckets.

Play from 22:36 But your ladder must match it exactly. Change the multiplier later, and every rung needs rebuilding.

Play from 22:45 Let's put the table on a calculator. I'll type a bid, and every granularity answers at once.

Play from 23:21 Two thirty-seven on medium: two point three zero. Seven cents below the bid.

Play from 23:39 Now a higher bid, twelve seventy-six. Watch dense. Above eight dollars it moves in fifty-cent steps, so it drops to twelve fifty. Medium does better here.

Play from 23:48 Twenty-four ten. Every built-in option flattens it at its cap.

Play from 23:53 Now our custom buckets, with a thirty-dollar cap. Twenty-four ten arrives as twenty-four, and the whole ladder is a hundred and seventy rungs.

Play from 23:55 Here's the number people forget. I'll set four bidders, as if we send all bids. Every rung count multiplies by four. Dense goes from four hundred and twenty-four to almost seventeen hundred. Hold that thought for chapter four.

Play from 23:56 A calculator is only useful if it agrees with Prebid. So let's ask Prebid itself. Back on the demo page, I'll switch the wrapper to auto, and run the auction again.

Play from 23:57 Two point three five. The live wrapper and the calculator agree. Do this check with your own wrapper before you build a single rung.

Play from 23:58 Three granularity mistakes we see.

Play from 24:01 One: the wrapper changes granularity, and nobody rebuilds the ladder. Bids now land on rungs that don't exist.

Play from 24:09 Two: a different granularity on each site or each page template, with one shared ladder. Some pages match. Others leak.

Play from 24:19 Three: the cap left at twenty dollars while video bids regularly arrive above it. Every one of those bids competes as twenty.

24:30Key-value design for several bidders

Play from 24:30 Chapter four. One bidder is easy. Now let's design keys that still work with four bidders, or twelve.

Play from 24:40 By default, Prebid sends every bidder's keys to Ad Manager. That mode is called send all bids.

Play from 24:48 First, the generic set for the overall winner: hb_pb, hb_bidder, hb_adid, hb_size and hb_format.

Play from 25:03 Then one set per bidder, with the bidder code on the end. hb_pb underscore rediads. hb_pb underscore sovrn.

Play from 25:14 Plus hb_ver, once per slot.

Play from 25:18 You saw this in the demo. Four bidders put twenty-six keys on one slot. Module 6 weighs this mode against sending only the top bid. Here, we just make the keys work.

Play from 25:32 Let's spend the network's two hundred keys, on paper.

Play from 25:36 Four bidders: five generic keys, plus twenty bidder keys, plus hb_ver. Twenty-six keys.

Play from 25:45 Twelve bidders: five, plus sixty, plus one. Sixty-six keys.

Play from 25:51 Add deal keys for private deals, and twelve bidders pass seventy-five.

Play from 25:56 Then your editorial keys, your audience keys and your test keys join them. Illustrative counts. Plan the budget before a new bidder quietly pushes you towards the limit.

Play from 26:09 Now the trap from our opening story. Ad Manager keeps only the first twenty characters of a key name.

Play from 26:17 hb_pb underscore rediads is thirteen characters. Safe.

Play from 26:23 hb_bidder underscore triplelift is exactly twenty. Still safe.

Play from 26:29 hb_bidder underscore improvedigital is twenty-four. Ad Manager cuts it to hb_bidder underscore improvedig.

Play from 26:39 hb_adid underscore smartadserver is twenty-one. It becomes hb_adid underscore smartadserve, without the final r.

Play from 26:51 Your line items and your creatives must use the cut name. Use the full name, and nothing ever matches. That's our Friday mystery, solved.

Play from 27:04 So make this a habit. Before you add a bidder, write out its longest key and count the characters.

Play from 27:11 The longest keys are usually hb_bidder and hb_format, at nine letters before the underscore.

Play from 27:20 So any bidder code longer than ten characters will be cut somewhere.

Play from 27:25 Prebid's bidder pages list the cut names for you. Copy them, don't retype them.

Play from 27:32 You can also send fewer keys per bidder.

Play from 27:35 Prebid's targeting controls let you choose which bidder-specific keys are sent.

Play from 27:40 A common hybrid: keep only price and bidder per bidder, for reporting. One generic set of rungs does the targeting.

Play from 27:49 That cuts twelve bidders from sixty bidder keys to twenty-four.

Play from 27:53 It also shortens the ad request. Prebid's docs show fifteen bidders adding about two thousand six hundred characters to it.

Play from 28:03 Not every key deserves a report. Choose deliberately.

Play from 28:08 Report on hb_bidder. It tells you who wins, and it's the first question in every revenue meeting.

Play from 28:17 Report on hb_pb, or each bidder's price key, if you want win prices by bucket.

Play from 28:25 Skip hb_adid. Its values are random, so a report on it has nothing useful to say.

Play from 28:33 And switch reporting on before launch. Remember, there's no backfill.

Play from 28:40 Good names save hours later. Prebid's docs suggest a simple pattern.

Play from 28:46 Orders: Prebid, the format, the bidder, a number. For example, Prebid, banner, RediAds, one.

Play from 28:55 Line items: the format and the price. Prebid, banner, two point three zero, plus the bidder when you send all bids.

Play from 29:04 Creatives: the format, the size and a copy number. Prebid, banner, one-by-one, number three.

Play from 29:12 Six months from now, someone will search for one rung in a hurry. Make it easy for them.

Play from 29:19 Three multi-bidder mistakes.

Play from 29:22 One: targeting the full key name of a long bidder code. The cut name is the only one Ad Manager knows.

Play from 29:30 Two: a new bidder added to the wrapper, but its keys never created in Ad Manager. Its bids travel, and nothing targets them.

Play from 29:39 Three: keys added for every bidder and every field, just in case. You fill the key budget, and you lengthen every ad request.

29:50Planning the line items

Play from 29:50 Chapter five. Before you build, plan. A line item plan fits on one slide, and it saves days of clean-up.

Play from 30:01 Your line item count is three numbers multiplied together.

Play from 30:05 Rungs per set of keys, from your granularity.

Play from 30:08 Sets of keys: one if you send the top bid, one per bidder if you send all bids.

Play from 30:14 Formats: banner and native can often share a ladder. In-stream video usually gets its own.

Play from 30:21 Multiply them, and you have your count. Then divide by four hundred and fifty to get your minimum number of orders.

Play from 30:30 Let's plan a real-looking site. Illustrative. Four bidders, send all bids.

Play from 30:37 Banner on auto: one hundred and seventy rungs, times four bidders. Six hundred and eighty line items.

Play from 30:44 In-stream video on a custom ladder: quarter-dollar steps to ten, then one-dollar steps to thirty. Forty plus twenty. Sixty rungs, times four. Two hundred and forty.

Play from 30:56 Total: nine hundred and twenty line items.

Play from 30:59 One order per bidder per format keeps every order under four hundred and fifty. That's eight orders.

Play from 31:08 Now the same site, sending only the top bid.

Play from 31:12 Banner: one hundred and seventy. Video: sixty. Two hundred and thirty line items in all.

Play from 31:19 One order for banner, one for video.

Play from 31:22 Four times fewer line items. But you lose every losing bid from your Ad Manager reports. That trade-off is the start of Module 6.

Play from 31:34 Nobody should build nine hundred line items by hand.

Play from 31:38 Start from a written plan: granularity, bidders, formats, sizes and names.

Play from 31:45 Feed it to a tool. Prebid's Line Item Manager is a free command-line tool, and the Ad Manager API can script the same work.

Play from 31:54 Google itself advises against approving or copying more than fifty line items at a time in the interface. Another reason to script it.

Play from 32:04 Some Ad Manager accounts can also use a feature called header bidding trafficking, which handles Prebid bidders without a ladder. Ask your Google contact whether it fits your set-up.

Play from 32:17 Then check the build before any traffic touches it.

Play from 32:21 Pick a few rungs at random, low, middle and high. Compare each one's targeting and rate with the plan.

Play from 32:29 Load a test page with test bids at those prices. Read the targeting in the Publisher Console, as in the demo.

Play from 32:36 And confirm that a Prebid line item wins when its bid is the best on offer. You'll learn to read that win in Module 7.

Play from 32:47 Three planning mistakes.

Play from 32:49 One: building first and counting later. The orders fill up halfway through a bidder.

Play from 32:56 Two: one giant order for every bidder. When you need to pause one bidder, you're filtering through hundreds of names.

Play from 33:04 Three: no written plan. A year later, nobody knows why video uses quarter-dollar steps, so nobody dares to change it.

33:15Recap and quick checks

Play from 33:15 Before we wrap up, three myths we hear from publishers.

Play from 33:20 Myth one: finer granularity always earns more. Fine steps help where your bids cluster. Elsewhere, they mostly add line items and work.

Play from 33:31 Myth two: Ad Manager sees the real bid. It doesn't. It sees the bucket, as a label, and competes the line item at its rate.

Play from 33:41 Myth three: once the set-up works, it stays working. Every new bidder, size or granularity change can break the match between the wrapper and the ladder.

Play from 33:53 Let's recap Module 5.

Play from 33:56 Ad unit codes, div IDs and Ad Manager ad units must line up.

Play from 34:02 Prebid competes through price priority line items, one rung per bucket, with the rate equal to the bucket.

Play from 34:10 Keys carry the bid. Values match as exact text, and reporting starts only when you switch it on.

Play from 34:17 Granularity trades lost value against line item count. Prebid rounds down and flattens above the cap.

Play from 34:25 With several bidders, budget your keys and use the cut names for long bidder codes.

Play from 34:31 And plan the count, then build it with a tool.

Play from 34:36 Quick check. Pause the video if you want to think.

Play from 34:43 You send all bids with five bidders, on medium granularity, banner only. How many Prebid line items, and at least how many orders?

Play from 34:50 One thousand line items. Medium needs two hundred rungs per set of keys, and each of the five bidders gets its own set. At four hundred and fifty per order, that's at least three orders. One order per bidder, five in all, is tidier.

Play from 35:09 Your bids now reach Ad Manager with the right labels, and a ladder is waiting for them.

Play from 35:20 In Module 6, we look at what happens next. Send all bids or the top bid. How the winning creative renders, including inside SafeFrames. And floors in two places, Prebid and Ad Manager, tested with a proper split.

Play from 35:33 That's Module 5. You can now build an Ad Manager set-up that receives every header bid with the right labels, at a price that's close to its real value.

Play from 35:46 Want to practise first? Try the levels in the RediAds Academy on blog dot rediads dot com.

Play from 35:52 And when you want a partner for any of this, the RediAds team is at rediads dot com. See you in Module 6.