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Selling guide

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This guide helps you understand the sell-side capabilities of Microsoft Monetize and provides step-by-step instructions for working with managed publishers with whom you have a direct financial relationship. For details about network-level features that apply to all publishers, see the Network Guide.

Tip

New to sell-side setup tasks and concepts? Check our Training: Microsoft Advertising's Learning Lab for self-paced videos and upcoming classroom and webinar sessions.

In this guide

  • Working with Publishers In Microsoft Advertising, the publisher object is the top level of the sell-side hierarchy (Publishers > Placement Groups > Placements). When you create a publisher, you define your financial and business relationship with the publisher, specify how you would like to sell the publisher's inventory to your Microsoft Advertising partners, and set the types of acceptable payments, payment terms, and ad quality settings.
  • Working with Payment Rules Payment rules represent a financial agreement between a network and a publisher. A network may have a single payment rule for all impressions from a publisher, or it might have a "base rule" that serves as a default. More specific "conditional rules" can be defined that apply to individual impressions based on geography, frequency, or other targeting.
  • Working with Ad Quality Ad quality settings allow sellers to determine which creatives will be allowed to serve on their inventory. These rules are applied based on attributes of the creative such as the buyer or brand. Sellers may also determine which rules to apply based on other information about the impression such as the size of the creative or the user's session frequency. This section provides an overview of the ad quality settings that can be configured for specific publishers. For more information about the ad quality options that apply across all or multiple publishers, see Working with Network Ad Quality.
  • Working with Placement Groups In Monetize, placement groups allow publishers to organize and categorize placements based on ad quality settings and auditing criteria. You can create numerous placement groups that live under a publisher. Additionally, since placement groups are the parents of placements, each placement group can act as a folder under which related placements can live. Lastly, if you wished to enable your placements for reselling, which adds them to the general pool of real-time unaudited inventory, you would do so at the placement group level.
  • Working with Placements A placement is basically an ad tag, for example, a 300x250 slot on mysite.com. Placements may be used by publishers, by their intermediaries who are using Microsoft Advertising Monetize as their publisher ad server, or by advertisers who wish to traffic a direct media buy through Microsoft Advertising Monetize. When you create a placement in Monetize, you select the size and types of creatives that can serve on the placement, set a reserve price for your managed and external demand or just for external demand and self-classify the placement with categories and sensitive attributes for targeting in campaigns and for reporting.
  • Reselling Managed Inventory In addition to selling your publishers' inventory to managed advertisers, you can resell managed inventory to the entire Microsoft Advertising platform. This section shows you the various ways to expose your inventory for targeting and how to make sure your placements can be bought by third parties.

Key sell-side features

Microsoft Monetize has a number of features that allow you to maintain business and technical relationships with your managed publishers.

Key features

Microsoft Monetize is more than just an ad server. Using Monetize, you can:

  • Set up publishers and traffic campaigns on managed inventory.
  • Resell inventory on the Microsoft Advertising platform for better monetization.
  • Apply optimization strategies to your direct campaigns; optimizing direct campaigns is as important as optimizing on third-party inventory.
  • Manage individual publishers' ad quality requirements, ensuring that you meet expectations about the quality and content of ads served on their sites.

Publishers, placement groups, and placements

Within Monetize, the hierarchy for Publisher organization is as follows: Publisher, Placement Group, Placement.

Publisher, the broadest unit, is where you define your financial relationship with a given publisher. A Placement Group can be thought of as a folder in which to organize your Placements; it's also where you will assign sensitive attributes and content categories. A Placement, the most granular unit, is equivalent to an ad tag or ad call. You can also define a financial relationship on the Placement level that overrides your settings at the Publisher level.

Regarding the relationships within this hierarchy: Each Publisher can be associated with one or more Placement Groups, and that a Placement Group may have one or more Placements beneath it.