Network guide

Microsoft Monetize is a sophisticated ad management technology platform with both buy- and sell-side capabilities. This guide helps you understand the Network-level features that apply across all advertisers and publishers in your account. For details about the features for individual advertisers and publishers, see the Buying Guide and Selling Guide

New to Microsoft Monetize? Check out our Training: Microsoft Advertising's Learning Lab.

In this guide - For buyers

• Working with Third-Party Inventory: Third-party inventory is defined as any inventory that does not originate from your own network. This includes inventory resold by other networks on the platform as well as by external entities like exchanges and SSPs. This section of the documentation contains reference material and instructions for researching and discovering third-party inventory on the Microsoft Advertising platform.
• Working with Targeting Lists: The primary purpose of a domain list is to group domains with similar characteristics so that you can include or exclude the domains from campaigns without having to review each individually. The reasons to include or exclude a domain are entirely up to you.
• Creative Templates: The Microsoft Advertising platform supports the most-commonly served types of creatives, such as banners and pops, as well as increasingly pervasive rich media types, such as interstitials, expandables, and videos. For each type of creative, Microsoft Advertising provides a standard creative template that ensures proper rendering on web pages when creatives are served. You can examine the rendering code and Microsoft Advertising macros used in these standard templates, but you cannot edit them. If you want to customize the way creatives render, you can build your own templates from scratch, or you can copy Microsoft Advertising standard templates and then modify them to fit your needs. With custom templates, you have complete control of the JavaScript or XML rendering code, and you can define macros to prompt your buyers to enter information and make decisions about the behavior of creatives during upload. You can have up to 100 custom templates.
• Viewing Your Object Limits: Microsoft Advertising limits the number of line items, campaigns, and creatives that you can have on the platform. In addition, Microsoft Advertising limits the number of domains that can be used in a single domain list and the number of certain targets that can be used in a single profile. The Object Limits Report allows you to view these limits and proactively monitor your current usage.
• Managing Custom Creative and Placement Sizes : You can define custom dimensions and use those sizes when adding creatives or placements to the system. These size dimensions are applicable in numerous locations throughout Microsoft Monetize. You can also indicate whether a size is standard or non-standard, which allows you to categorize the sizes as needed throughout the user interface.
• Capping Daily Spend on Third-Party Inventory (Safety Budget): A safety budget allows you to set a network-wide cap for your daily spend on third-party inventory. This helps limit the risk of unintentional overspend due to trafficking and campaign setup errors. Your safety budget always operates on the timezone of your network and resets each day at 12am. This section walks you through the process of setting your safety budget and selecting which users should be alerted 80% of your safety budget and again when it has been hit.
• Managing Targeting Templates: Targeting templates allow buyers to apply pre-established inventory and user targeting settings to campaigns. These templates can be saved and applied when creating or editing a campaign; however, the Targeting Templates screen is the only place where you can view the details of each template and choose one template to act as the default for all new campaigns.
• Working with Third-Party Buying Filters: There are literally billions of chances for buyers to purchase impressions every single day. However, this is never done; buyers have finite budgets and must choose the web sites on which they want their ads to run with great care. In addition to campaign-specific specifications, buyers can also create filters that govern all of their campaigns. This section explains how you can include or exclude specific domain lists and/or include specific countries for all campaigns in your account that buy third-party inventory.
• Managing Notification Recipients: This section shows you how to specify which users in your account receive creative audit and object limit notifications. For details about setting notification recipients for your daily safety budget, see Capping Daily Spend on Third-Party Inventory (Safety Budget).
• Managing User Logins and Permissions: You can create users who have different levels of access to your Microsoft Advertising account. This is useful if you want your network's account managers or salespeople to view only the accounts they are responsible for or if your advertisers want to run reports for themselves.

In this guide - For sellers

• Working with Network 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 by network administrator users. For more information about the configuration options available to publisher users, see Working with Ad Quality.
• Managing Your Inventory Reselling Exposure: As a seller, you may want to allow other platform members to target some of your managed inventory. This section of the documentation describes how to expose your inventory for resale to other members on a network-wide or per-publisher basis. In addition, it provides links to more information about how to make inventory available to some buyers and not others.
• Viewing Your Object Limits: Microsoft Advertising limits the number of publishers, placement groups, and placements that you can have on the platform. The Object Limits Report allows you to view these limits and proactively monitor your current usage.
• Manage Custom Content Categories: Custom content categories allow you to apply a single label to a number of placement groups and/or placements. Buyers can then more easily research and buy your inventory. This area of Microsoft Monetize displays a working list of your custom content categories, allowing you to create buckets in which you can group your inventory.
• Managing Custom Creative and Placement Sizes: You can define custom dimensions and use those sizes when adding creatives or placements to the system. These size dimensions are applicable in numerous locations throughout Microsoft Monetize. You can also indicate whether a size is standard or non-standard, which allows you to categorize the sizes as needed throughout the user interface.
• Managing User Logins and Permissions: You can create users who have different levels of access to your Microsoft Advertising account. This is useful if you want your network's account managers or salespeople to view only the accounts they are responsible for or if your publishers want to run reports for themselves.