Targeting

Targeting

This plugin implements advanced DFP targeting criteria to allow trafficers to specify pages or groups of pages where line items should serve.

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1. Example

A local restaurant might wish to only have their ads shown a landing page and related article pages for a publisher's food category.

In the above example, this line item is targeting all posts in the Category "food".

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2. Available targeting criteria

The following WordPress and general targeting criteria are defined for each ad call:

WordPress Targeting —

Targeting criteria specific to WordPress variables.

• Page → Target the type of page.

  Takes the values of 'home', 'front-page', 'admin', 'admin-bar-showing', 'single', 'archive', 'author', 'date' or 'search'.

• Category → On single pages, target based on WordPress category. The value(s) passed are the WordPress slug for the category.

• Tag → On single pages, target based on WordPress tags. The value(s) passed are the WordPress slug for the tag.

URL Targeting —

Additional targeting criteria set by the URL of the page.

• inURL → Target a piece of the page path.

  eg. targeting the string '/dvds' would match example.com**/dvds**/, example.com**/dvds**/page1 and example.com**/dvds**/page2

• URLIs → Target the entire page path.

  eg. targeting the string '/books' will only match example.com**/books** and not example.com**/books/page1**. (Note: Any trailing '/' is removed.)

• Domain → Target based on the domain.

  eg. run different advertising on staging.example.com and example.com.

• Query → Target a ?query var.

  eg. target the url example.com/?movie=12 with the targeting string 'p:12'

Warning: Targeting strings are limited to 40 characters long by DFP. Targeting URLIs or domains longer than that will result in error.

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3. Defining targeting criteria in DFP

DFP needs to be told what filter keys exist before they can be used.

Example

In Inventory > Custom Targeting, hit "New Key,"

Enter a name for the key and "values type" to indicate whether this key is static or dynamic.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we will use the Category targeting key. Also for our purposes, we will assume the site has a small number of predefined categories, such as "sports", "arts", "news" and "opinion". This is better suited for a value type of "Users will select from predefined targeting values" (static).

If a key is more dynamic, such as a blog that uses hundreds of categories, "values type" should be set it "Users will enter targeting values when creating line items or checking inventory"

On the next screen enter values the key could take. This will be a list of categories, unique domains, url segments, tags, &c.

Using the targeting criteria

Now, when creating a line item, select "custom criteria" from the left hand menu under targeting. After entering a targeting key, select one or more options:

This line item will show only on article pages that belong in the news category.

The available targeting criteria section above contains more information about what is possible with different criteria.