Creating Inventory

Inventory is the word used to described the advertising spaces that you offer. For example, one is the banner that could appear above the header on every page. There are a number of pre-determined spaces in the Newspack theme you can use as well as setting your own for inserting in sidebars and posts/pages. We’re going to use the “above header” slot as an example.

  1. First log in to your Google Ad Manager (GAM) account.
  2. Click on “Inventory” in the menu and then on Ad Units
  3. Click on “New Ad Unit”
  4. There are a lot of options here but you really only need to focus on two – Name and Sizes.
  5. Give your ad unit a descriptive name. Let’s choose “Above Header” for simplicity.
  6. Provide a value for “Code” too. This is a machine-readable value that is unchangeable. As you can see in our example we chose the same name but in lowercase and with the space turned to a hyphen to comply with the validation rules.
  7. Now we choose the sizes. Since we know this ad will appear above the header we want a horizontal banner that doesn’t push the content down too much. We also need to recognise that the same ad spot will appear on mobiles and tablets so we need to ensure appropriate sizes are added for different device widths.
  8. By simply clicking in the Sizes field a list of suggestions will appear.
  9. You can also type the name of common ad unit sizes, such as “leaderboard”, which is exactly what we’ll do in this example. Make sure to select all three, like so:
  10. That’s all we need to do – click Save to create your ad unit.

Now add your ad unit to Newspack. Note: When you add your ad units to Newspack you’ll need the name, code and sizes you just entered into Google Ad Manager.

Uploading Adverts

We’ve sold our “above header” slot to a local advertiser and they’ve provided us with banner images at the required sizes of 970×90, 728×90 and 320×50. Now we need to add these to Google Ad Manager.

  1. First, we need to add the advertiser. In GAM, go to Admin > Companies
  2. Click on “New Company” and choose “Advertiser”
  3. Add as much or as little information about your advertiser as you like here and click Save
  4. Now we have our advertiser added, we can add their adverts, aka “creatives”
  5. In your GAM account, go to Delivery > Creatives
  6. Click New Creative and choose your newly created advertiser when prompted.
  7. In the next screen we have a choice of advert types. As we’re adding local direct-sold advertising we’ll just be choosing the basic image option.
  8. To make life easier, make sure your advert image files are named like this: advertiser-name-970x90.png where advertiser-name is of course the name of the advertiser and 970x90 is the dimensions of this particular ad.
  9. Use the uploader in the image files section to upload your advert image file

    The new creative will be automatically given a name that matches the filename. It’s best to keep this as it will help you find the creative when you need them later on.
  10. Add the target ad unit size – in this case, it’s 970×90.
  11. Now all you need to do is add the Clickthrough URL – the website address that anyone clicking the advert will be sent to.
  12. Click Save

Displaying Ads

We’ve created the ad spots we want to provide to advertisers, and we’ve added our first advert. Now we need to connect that all up to make the ads actually display on our site.

  1. In GAM, go to Delivery > Orders and hit the New Order button.
    An order essentially describes the contractual agreement. So, a single advertiser buying 3 ad slots for a period of 2 months for example.
  2. Choose a name, e.g. “Advertiser Inc, September sale promotion”
  3. Click the advertiser field to select the relevant advertiser
  4. Click Add Line Item and then select Display Ad
    A line item is basically where you determine which ads show in which ad spots.
  5. Give it a name, e.g. “Advertiser Inc Above Header”
  6. Choose a line item type
    This is where things get a little more complicated. Type helps determine the frequency at which this advert is shown.
    Generally, you should just leave it at “Standard”
    If you had sold the advertiser a percentage of impressions you’d need to choose House and later on specify the percentage.
  7. Under Expected creatives we need to add each of the ad sizes we want to include. We know that we only have the three we listed when adding our creative – 970×90, 728×90 and 320×50 – so we’ll enter those here.
  8. Under delivery settings, choose the start and end time, which is likely directly impacted by whatever deal you struck with your advertiser.
  9. At this point you can also specify how many impressions are needed, which is useful if you’re selling your ads based on the number of impressions or a specific CPM.
  10. Skip the “Adjust Delivery” section for now as we don’t necessarily need to use that.
  11. Under “Ad Targeting” we could leave this alone. If we don’t make any changes our advert will appear in any ad slot we have defined in our account that matches one of the three sizes we’ve specified. This makes it easy to sell “any 728×90 ad slot” for example. In this case, we’re specifically interested in the Above Header slot.
  12. Click on Inventory, then Ad Units. You’ll see our “Above Header” slot. Hover on that and click the check mark.
  13. Click Save
    Our Line Item is now saved, in our new Order, but we’re missing something – creatives.
  14. Click on Creatives and you’ll see this:
  15. For each one, click “Existing creative”
  16. From the popup screen, click Creatives and you’ll be shown any existing creatives that match the right dimensions.
  17. You should see the creative we uploaded earlier – select them and click Save. We now have three creatives added to our Line Item:
  18. At the top of the screen you’ll see a breadcrumb that includes the Advertiser name, the name of the Order we created. Click on the Order name, in this case it’s “Advertiser, Inc September sale promotion”:
  19. Click on “Approve”. This tells Google that it can now start serving the adverts within the order’s line items. It can take a little while to kick in but the ads will then start appearing on our Newspack site. If anything seems amiss, each Line Item has a Troubleshooting tab which can help with idenifying ad serving issues.
Support Home

Advertising Table of Contents