How to book interstitials in your web solution in Google Ad Manager

This guide will go through the basics of booking image interstitials in Google Ad Manager in your ePaper solution for web.

If you are not familiar with booking ads in Google Ad Manager (e.g. on your website), we recommend you to book through the Visiolink Publishing Hub instead. Implementing Google Ads interstitials will disable the possibility to book from the publishing hub.

1. Create Ad Units   

You can place three fixed ad positions in your ePaper. In addition, you can create a frequency controlled position that is displayed dependent on the number of swipes the user makes. As a default this is set to 12 swipes. The number can be set in the publishing hub. 

The fixed positions are placed after a page number in the publication. You can place them e.g. after page 1, after page 5 and after page 9. The page numbers must be odd numbers. The frequency position works fine with the fixed positions, as it will simply be shown X number of swipes after any ad has been displayed.

It is possible to place different ad units in different publications if you have more than one title (controlled by prefixes in the Visiolink system).  

2. Book creatives in two sizes 

To make sure that interstitials are not cropped when displayed on small screens, they must be booked in two sizes:

1024x768 px (displayed on screens wider than 1360 px)
640x480 px (displayed on screens smaller or equivalent to 1360 px)

 
Illustration: Two creatives booked on the same line item targeting small and large screens  

This means that the line item must ask for creatives in these two sizes under Expected creatives (see illustration below)

Illustration: Line items must be set to expect creatives in the sizes 640x480 and 1024x768

Empty ad units will be ignored, so that the user swipes to the next page (there might be a short delay when swiping past an empty ad unit, as we will need to ask the ad unit if there are any ads booked). 

NOTE: As the web reader is seen as a single page system by Google, it is not possible to book the same ad on two two different ad units at the same time. Google will prevent the ad on one of the ad units to be shown. If you wish to book an ad to be shown on more than one position, please use the frequency controlled position. 

3. Provide Visiolink with account ID and ad unit IDs

Visiolink will need an overview of which ad units should be placed after which pages in which publications. Furthermore, we need the account ID of your Google Ad Manager account.

It could look like this: