Supply Onboarding

As a first step in connecting with Commerce Grid, your service team will walk you through the integration process to establish a connection via your preferred method.

Visit the Integration Guide section for detailed documentation on the available integration types for Commerce Grid.

Ads.txt implementation is essential to ad monetization, as it allows you to declare your monetization partners (such as Commerce Grid) to buyers. Premium buyers only want to buy on paths they can validate, and Ads.txt is the simplest way to ensure validation.

After your kick-off call, your service team will generate and send Commerce Grid Ads.txt lines for you to implement into your Ads.txt (and app.ads.txt when applicable) files. Additionally, you can navigate to your Inventory Group in the Commerce Grid platform to copy necessary ads.txt and app.ads.txt records.

You will also be required to place Ads.txt files for every new domain or app bundle you connect after your initial onboarding.

Got Ads.txt questions? Refer to the IAB's Ads.txt guide for support on implementation.

The Inventory Management module in the Commerce Grid UI is where you connect and manage your inventory.

Here, you'll have the option to manage:

• Inventory Groups

• Ad Units

• Domains

• App Bundles

When setting up your Commerce Grid account, your service team will create a default Inventory Group or several default Inventory groups depending on the integration types you will use to power your inventory monetization.

You can then follow this guide to extend your setup and include other portions of your supply into new Inventory Groups.

For integrations requiring Ad Unit level inventory Mapping (all integrations except Amazon TAM), you must create Ad Units under the respective Inventory Groups. From an ad unit mapping standpoint, you can either mirror your current ad unit mapping structure (RON - Run of Network, ROS - Run of Site, etc) or come up with a hybrid approach for different portions of your inventory.

• Follow the Ad Units guideline to map your specific ad units to Commerce Grid

• If you want a Commerce Grid representative to do a bulk ad unit mapping upload for larger ad unit portions, please provide your service team with the updated mapping in a .csv file.

Your Commerce Grid account allows you to control and manage multiple 'child' accounts within one workflow. These child accounts are Inventory Groups.

Within the UI, each publisher can manage one or more ‘child’ inventory groups through which sites, application bundles, ad slots, and ads.txt entries can be grouped and organized. An inventory group can also be used to group Run of Site (ROS) or Run of Network (RON) inventory. For example, you may create an inventory group to manage a collection of sports sites and a different inventory group to manage a collection of cooking recipe sites. You can also use separate inventory groups to:

• Run a portion of the supply under a different ads.txt entry

• Break out Prebid and Amazon TAM integrations (recommended)

• Support granular advertiser blocklists

To create an inventory group, use the following steps.

1. Open the new inventory groups page by selecting Inventory Management ‣ Inventory Groups ‣ + Create Inventory Group

2. Enter the group name and generate a custom ads.txt entry if necessary. Note: Each domain needs to host its publisher’s ads.txt entry.

3. In the Blocked Creative Categories field, select the kinds of ads you do not want to be shown on your sites, e.g. IAB-26 (Illegal content). By default, a few types of creatives are blocked.

4. Once you are ready, click Create New Inventory Group. After this, you can create Ad Units for this Inventory Group.

Ad units form the basis for the avails you sell on your sites.

Each ad unit is filled by an appropriate creative that matches the dimensions you specify and, in the case of video, the supported video types. To create ad units, use the following steps.

1. Select Inventory Management ‣ Ad Units ‣ +Create Ad Units.

2. Set the Ad Unit Name and associate it with an Inventory Group.

3. Set the Inventory Type

4. Set the Media Type. Depending on the type, you need to fill in some additional settings.

   • For Display on both Websites and in App, set the sizes that are available to Buyers, e.g. 320x50, 728x90, 160x600

   • For Video on Websites, CTV, and In App, you need to specify the following.

     • Set the supported video sizes

     • Set whether the video should be skippable

     • Set the Video Placement Type to either Instream, Outstream, In-Feed, or Interstitial.

     • Set the Minimum Duration and Maximum Duration

     • Set the supported API Framework and MIME types

5. Once finished, select Create Ad Unit. After this is done, you can copy the ad tag or ad unit ID based on your specific setup.

The ID of the ad unit provided by Commerce Grid platform plays the most crucial role in the integration process:

• It needs to be passed within imp.tagid field for any server-side-based integrations (Prebid Server, Publica, SpringServe)

• For regular Prebid.js and Prebid Server integrations Ad Unit ID needs to be configured as uid within the wrapper setup

• For tag-based integrations, the ad unit ID is part of the tag, &auid={created_ad_unit_ID}

• Use the ID column in the Ad Units table in the UI

• Or use the Download List button to bulk download all of the contents of the pre-filtered Ad Units table

When launching traffic, please ensure that all the necessary Ad Units are set to Active status. You can pause the trading against any specific ad unit without changing the page integration if you switch the Ad Unit status to Inactive. Please make sure that you’re not deactivating a critical performant ad unit!

Commerce Grid domains correlate 1:1 with the domain URLs you are monetizing.

Each domain you'd like to monetize via Commerce Grid must be added here, and must host an up-to-date ads.txt file stating its Commerce Grid relationship.

To submit a domain under your Commerce Grid account, use the following steps.

1. Select Inventory Management ‣ Domains ‣ +Add New Domain(s) Make sure each domain hosts an ads.txt file with the respective Commerce Grid-specific ads.txt file from inventory group settings.

2. Select Add Domain(s). Fill in the Domain URLs (Min. 1) window and specify content categories for each domain by choosing them from the list below. From here, you can copy/paste the domains you want to add. Given that you’ll need to assign an IAB category for each domain, we recommend loading them in batches of similar domains to help organize and ensure you don't misassign an IAB category. Once a domain has been created, you can specify its content categories from the list of domains by clicking on the line_style icon on the Content Cat. Column.

After you submit your domains to Commerce Grid, they will be reviewed. The "Status" column shows whether not your domain has been approved for monetization via Commerce Grid.

The "Ads.txt Status" column indicates the status of the buying path on that domain, showing Authorized, when the Commerce Grid Ads.txt line is implemented correctly, unknown when we are unable to crawl and confirm the status, and unauthorized when the Ads.txt line has not been implemented, or implemented incorrectly.

Note: If you are running multiple inventory groups with custom ads.txt entries, please ensure that you have all the custom ads.txt entries deployed across your properties as well as the master ads.txt entry.