Learn the ad approval process

The basics of managing ad approval

All ads on Authorized Buyers go through an approval process to make sure they're safe and appropriate for users. Each ad is reviewed for compliance with our advertising policies.

If any issues are found, you'll receive a notification about our policies and information about what you can do to get your ad approved.

Submit ads for approval

Ads cannot be shown until they've been reviewed and approved.

Whenever you create a new ad or make changes to an existing ad, your ad is automatically submitted for review. If you edit an approved ad, it returns to the queue for review and cannot run until it's been re-approved.

Timeline

Ads are reviewed as quickly as possible, usually within a couple of hours. The ad review system may check the content you're advertising, your advertiser's website, cookie usage, and technology vendor usage.

If you've waited for your ads to be reviewed for more than two business days, please contact us.

Approval status

During the approval process, your ads are given a status. You can see the status of your ad by logging into your account and looking at the "Status" column of your Creatives tab. Here are the possible statuses:

  • Pending review: Your ad is still being reviewed by Google
  • Approved: Your ad has been accepted and can now be run
  • Disapproved: There's an issue with your ad, and it can't run right now
  • Certificate required:  Your creative comes under the category of online gambling and doesn't have a US state certificate.
     

Example

A gambling ad MAY have a status of "Conditionally approved", as we only serve this type of content in a limited number of countries for deals-only transactions.

Manage disapproved ads

If your ad does not comply with Authorized Buyers policies, it will be marked as disapproved.

You can see all of your ad disapprovals in Creatives.**

Re-submit your creatives

There are three ways to get disapproved ads reviewed to be eligible for auction.

  • REST API: Submit a creative re-review request by using REST API***
  • BidResponse: Once you have fixed a disapproved creative, submit a new (versioned) creative ID via a bid response. This will ensure that the creative is automatically reviewed by our verification system.
  • Manual request: If you are unable to re-submit creatives via the REST API or a bid response, contact the Authorized Buyers support team to manually request a creative re-review.

Creatives running on Open Auction inventory and in a Preferred Deal have two separate statuses, available in Authorized Buyers and the REST API v1.4 and later.

Your creative may be disapproved for Open Auction serving but approved for serving in a Preferred Deal.

Creatives uploaded via the API must be fetchable (ready to serve) at the time you upload them.

Automated creative reviews

Authorized Buyers conducts automated creative reviews in order to maintain the quality of ads on the exchange. While this does not change the Authorized Buyers guidelines, creatives that don't meet our policies are paused until corrected.

The most common issues are: destination URL not working, flash cookies, raw IP addresses, missing or broken click macros, invalid fourth-party calls, undeclared or incorrect landing page, customer creative ID misuse, non certified vendors, and creative download sizes.

For additional details on these guidelines, please visit Authorized Buyers policies and enforcement. 

  ** Creatives can be found if they have been active (submitted or bid with) within the past 15 days.
 *** If you re-submit a currently approved creative via the REST API, it will stop serving until re-approved.

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