Thanks for signing up and advertising with Sevio Ad Manager!
This article will guide you through the process of joining Sevio’s Ad Manager and monetizing your inventory. We will cover topics such as: adding your first inventory, setting up your ad zones, managing advertisers, and more.
So, let’s dive into all the details to help you start monetizing your website more efficiently.
1. Set up Your Inventories
Setting up your inventory is the first step in setting up your Sevio account. Your inventory represents the ad space on your website or app where you display advertisements.
From your main dashboard, head to the Inventories tab on the left side of your screen. From there, click on the “Add Inventory” button.
At this point, it is essential to understand that there are two types of inventories: Website or App (Android or iOS).
Once you select your inventory type, all you must do is fill in the general details of your inventory, such as Domain Name/App Bundle Name/App ID, Alias, and Category.
The second step consists of customizing your ad preferences. This means allowing or disallowing specific ad categories, seats, domains, or creatives.
In this step, you can also choose to toggle on Unique Creatives or Unique Advertisers. Turning these on will prevent the same creative or ad item from being shown in multiple ad zones on the same page.
However, bear in mind that this may leave certain ad zones empty.
After choosing the website inventory type, you need to configure your ads.txt file. This file ensures that your digital ad space is only sold by approved sellers.
On Sevio Ad Manager, using ads.txt is mandatory.
If you already have an ads.txt file:
During the setup of your ad inventory in Sevio Ad Manager, you'll be given a URL link to redirect your ads.txt page to or a snippet of text to directly append to your ads.txt file. Paste this new data and click "Verify" in Sevio Ad Manager to validate.
If you haven't created an ads.txt file yet:
Download the ads.txt file generated by Sevio Ad Manager, upload it to your website's main directory, and ensure accessibility via your website's URL followed by "/ads.txt."
After confirmation, click "Verify" in Sevio Ad Manager to activate your ad inventory.
2. Set up your Ad Zones
After adding your first inventory, you need to set up your ad zones. These are the places on your website/app where ads will be displayed. Each inventory can have multiple ad zones, and you can manage all of them from the inventory setting.
To add a new ad zone, first click on the “Settings” button next to your inventory. Then, click the “Add Zone” button and fill in the General Details of your Ad Zone. These include fields such as Name, Ad Type (Banner/Native), Ad Size (for Banner Ads), and Native Templates (for Native Ads).
Additionally, you can choose to customize your ad delivery options for that specific ad zone:
- Ad Refreshing determines whether the ads refresh after a given period. Please note that only visible ads are refreshed.
- User Max Clicks sets a limit on the number of clicks that can be registered from a single user. Please note that this setting only applies to campaigns delivered through Sevio, as external bidders may not provide accurate click information.
- User Max Clicks Interval determines how often the User Max Clicks attribute gets reset. For example, setting User Max Clicks to 3 and User Max Clicks Interval to 600 will register no more than 3 clicks in 10 minutes from the same user, starting from the same click.
The second step is setting up your Ad Preferences for that specific zone.
Please be aware that Ad Zone preferences will be prioritized over Inventory Ad Preferences. This means that you can, for example, block specific ad categories on an inventory level while still allowing them to be displayed in a specific ad zone.
3. Adding an Advertiser
Our Ad Manager lets you manage advertisers directly inside our platform. This makes it easy to keep track of all the campaigns you deliver through your inventory.
To add an advertiser, first head to the Advertisers tab from the left side menu and click on “Add Advertiser”. Then, type in a name for your advertiser.
Please note that each advertiser can have multiple campaigns, which you can assign to specific ad zones.
4. Set up an Advertiser Campaign
To create a campaign, from the Advertisers dashboard, open the Advertiser’s settings and head over to the Campaigns tab from the top menu.
Then simply click the add campaign button and set up the campaign for your advertiser from the new window. Type in a campaign name, select the status, input the advertiser's domain, and choose the best-suited category.
For example, if your advertiser is a stock exchange, you can choose Business or Personal Finance as a category.
Once you complete these simple steps, your new campaign will appear on the campaign tab. In case you missed something or if you wish to change a detail from your campaign, don't worry; you can modify anything by accessing the settings button to the right of the campaign.
5. Add the Ad Items
Ad items are vital for delivering ads to targeted audiences and for a publisher to manage and track the advertisers' campaigns. As such, an ad item withholds the required data to deliver the ad.
Adding an ad item is done in 4 simple steps.
1. Fill in the General Details
This means naming your Ad Item so you can easily identify it and setting its status.
2. Customize Schedule & Pricing
The Schedule & Pricing tab lets you customize how and when the ads will be delivered, as well as what pricing model they will use.
The first 2 fields, Priority, and Weight, let you customize the importance of this ad item in comparison to any other ad items available. For example, setting a Priority of Sponsorship [1] and a Weight of 100 means your ad item will be a top priority while setting a priority of Unsold [6] and a Weight of 1 means it will have the least priority.
Moving on, pricing models determine how an advertiser pays the publisher for displaying ads. You can choose between CPM (Cost per Mille), CPC (Cost per Click), and CPD (Cost per Day).
After choosing the pricing model that best fits your needs, set your Bid and your Starting and Ending Dates.
Finally, the ad serving limit option temporarily restricts the number of ads shown from a particular account, website, or app. You can limit your ad serving based on budget or interactions or set no limit.
3. Set Frequency Capping
Moving on, we will have to decide how often we deliver the ad items based on various user interactions. And we will do that with the Frequency Capping settings.
Frequency capping restricts the maximum number of impressions/views a visitor can see a specific ad within a period.
Using this feature prevents your ad from showing too often, thus becoming irrelevant or irritating for visitors. There are 3 types of frequency capping you can apply:
1. Global Capping
Global Capping determines how many times an ad item will be delivered, based on the selected frequency.
2. User Capping
User Capping determines how many times can a specific user see an ad item.
3. After Click Capping
After Click Capping will stop delivering the ad item to a specific user for a specified time, after that user clicked the ad item.
For each capping setting, you can set an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly frequency.
4. Customize your Audience Targeting
The final step is targeting your audience.
Audience targeting lets you segment your advertisers' target audience to deliver the most relevant ads to the right people. As a result, it improves ad relevance and enhances ad performance.
You can refine the audience by:
- Country targeting;
- Browser targeting;
- Operating system targeting;
- Device targeting.
6. Campaign Assets
With Ad Items out of the way, the next step is to create assets for each of our ad items.
Campaign assets are digital content deliverables that are part of the ad campaign, and they can contain Static, HTML, or JavaScript creatives.
To create an asset, go to the advertiser tab, select your advertiser, open the "Assets” tab, and click on “Add Asset”. This brings up a window where you can choose the Ad Type (Banner or Native) and set the Name and the Landing URL of your asset.
You can also opt for an External Code under the "Ad Type" field. For more details on External Codes, please check out our Documentation.
Assign Assets to Ad Items
Once you created your asset, go ahead and assign it to your Ad Items. This can be done by going to the “Assets” tab and clicking the “Assign to Ad Items” button next to your Asset.
This will open a new window where you can select the Campaign(s) and Ad Item(s) to which you can assign the Asset.
7. Add Creatives
To serve ads, you must add creatives to your campaign assets. You can pick between 3 types of creatives:
- Static creatives (JPG, PNG, SVG, or GIF);
- HTML5 creatives;
- Script creatives.
To add creatives to an asset, open an Advertiser’s settings, then select the Asset, and head to the Creatives tab. Then simply click on the “Add Creative” button.
In the new window, select the Creative Type and upload/fill in all the details.
Once you add a creative, it will be available in the creative gallery.
8. Assign Your Campaign to Sevio's Ad Zone
The setup is nearly complete.
All that’s left is to assign the recently created ad items to your dedicated ad zones. You can attribute ad items to one or multiple ad zones.
To do that, head over to the campaign, open the “Zone Assignment” tab, and click on “Assign to Zones”. Once you assign all your ad items to ad zones, you will start delivering ads on your inventory.
Please remember that you need at least one ad item to make an assignment, and you can only assign a campaign to a zone of the corresponding type.
9. Sevio Ad's Manager Reporting System
After successfully setting up your inventories and deploying campaigns, it is time to measure how these performed. As such, Sevio Ad's Manager gives you the possibility to create four types of reports:
- General Reports;
- Inventory Reports;
- Campaign Reports;
- Ad Item Reports;
You can access the reporting system from the main dashboard under the insight tab. To run a report, regardless of its type, simply choose the specific type from the header tabs, customize the date and time, and hit the generate button.