There are several best practices to take into consideration when creating tags with Ad Manager. This article focuses on what you can do within Google Ad Manager.
We recommend that developers review the Google Publisher Tag best practices and ad best practices.
Use AMP and serve mobile-optimized creatives
Implement Ad Manager on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to monetize your fast-loading pages. Learn how to generate AMP ad tags
Creative latency is one of the biggest causes of poor ad performance. Avoid heavy creatives. Follow industry guidelines, such as on pages 5-6 of the IAB Mobile Advertising Guidelines (PDF).
Optimize your backfill ads
GPT uses the Page Visibility API to determine whether or not the page is visible to a user. A page may not be visible if it is the background tab of a browser. The browser may also be minimized or the device's screen may be turned off.
When GPT determines that a page is not visible, it only requests and renders above-the-fold ads. This is so that:
- Ad slots visible in the first viewport will not be blank rectangles if/when the page becomes visible.
- Signals need for pageview counting are still sent correctly.
If the page refreshes while hidden, ads that are above-the-fold will not be loaded as they are not visible to the user.
Once GPT detects that the page has become visible, all ads are rendered as normal. This may include other behaviors that further delay creative rendering, such as lazy loading.
Fix problems with ad speed
If your ad speed grade is "Poor" or "Fair", you can run Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse to try and improve it.
Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse provides recommendations for improving ad speed and overall quality through a series of automated audits.
To learn more, review the Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse documentation.
Only use the version of GPT served by Google
You should not serve gpt.js, pubads_impl.js, or any scripts they load from your own server or load them from an unofficial source.
Using a version of GPT not served from an official source is unsupported and thus may not always work in newer versions of browsers or operating systems and may not be updated with new features and improvements. Older versions of the GPT library can be discontinued or start having their ad requests rejected at any time possibly leading to loss of ad revenue.
