Ad Yield Ops 104: Using Our Price Floor Template

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Now that we’ve covered the concept of how base prices and targeting levers work together, you can begin to think about how you want to execute your own price floor strategy.

We’ve created a template that will help you manage your very own custom price floor strategy in a single location, and automatically combine your chosen levers with your ad unit base prices in order to build your strategy.

We’ll start by setting ad unit base prices.

Once you download the template, you’ll start on the “Ad Unit Base Prices” Tab.

On this tab you’ll list all of your ad units by name and set your starting or base prices for each.

Right now the template currently supports 16 different ad units. You can simply name the ones you don’t want to use with placeholder names (but don’t delete the cells as this has the potential to break the logic in the template).

Next, we’ll manage targeting criteria.

Now we’ll start setting the percentages for our targeting criteria levers. The template is pre-built with the ability to combine up to 6 different targeting criteria. You’ll be able to manage your rule percentages for each of the 6 categories in separate tabs.

Because Browser and Country are some of the most common factors used in price floor rules, we’ve included them by default.

We’ll start setting our targeting criteria rules with Browser. Navigate to the “Browser Rules” tab.

On this tab you’ll be able to set your desired percentages based on the value of each of the standard browsers. Keep in mind that using a percentage more than 100% will increase the CPM from your base price, and less than 100% will decrease the CPM from your base price.

Next, we’ll set our rules for countries. Navigate to the “Country Rules” tab.Here you will start by breaking up countries into groups. You can break them up however makes the most sense to you, often people start by breaking them into standard tier groups.

The template has space for up to 10 different country groups. If you have less than 10 groups (which you likely should), you can simply name the ones you don’t want to use with placeholder names (but don’t delete the cells as this has the potential to break the logic in the template).Now it is time to have some fun. The rest of the targeting criteria options are up to you!

Navigate to the appropriate tab for the custom rule you want to build. There is space in the template for up to 4 additional targeting criteria rules in addition to Browser and Country.

The tabs are titled “Targeting Criteria 4” through “Targeting Criteria 6”.In each of these tabs, you can title the targeting criteria however you’d like. 

Now you’ll want to decide if you are going to use the criteria “as-is” or break it into groups. 

Let’s go through a reminder of what these mean.

We use “As-is” Targeting Criteria to describe target categories where you’ll use the exact list of options available in Google Ad Manager. For instance, if you wanted to incorporate Device as a targeting criteria, you'd probably just use the standard list of devices provided by Google Ad Manager, which includes desktop, mobile, tablet, and so on.

And second, we use “Grouping” Targeting Criteria when you want to group multiple options into a one rule. For instance, if you wanted to incorporate Hour of the Day as targeting criteria, you’ll probably want to break it into groups which each cover multiple hours like: early morning (4:00AM - 6:00AM), mid-morning (8:00AM - 10:00AM), afternoon (1:00PM - 4:00PM), and so on, so you don’t end up with too many variations.

From there you can simply assign the percentages you’d like to the groups you created.
Each tab for managing rules for custom targeting criteria has space for 10 groups. If you have less than 10 groups, you can simply name the ones you don’t want to use with placeholder names (but don’t delete the cells as this has the potential to break the logic in the template).

How do you choose your targeting criteria?

If you aren’t sure which other factors you want to use as your custom price rule targeting criteria, our ad yield management team recommends starting with some of these options:

• Device Type: The type of device a user is on will have a factor in determining how valuable the impression is. Typically on mobile devices and tablets, inventory is simply not as valuable as that on desktop.
• Day of Week: Different days of the week tend to perform better than others for average CPMs. Typically we find across our network that Fridays and weekends perform better than other days of the week, but this may be different for your site.
• Hour of Day: You can even go so far as to make specific price floor rules for time of day. In general we’ve found that CPMs tend to be higher in the middle of night, spike in the morning, and go down in the afternoon.

After you’ve finished entering in all your targeting criteria information, it’s time to build your combined price floor rules. To do so, you’ll navigate to the “Rule Configuration” tab.

Here you’ll select which combinations of your targeting criteria you want to put together to create a custom pricing rule.

Start by selecting a name for your rule. It is easiest to match this exactly to the way you’ll name the rule in Google Ad Manager, so you can easily track which rules to change in the future if you want to adjust them.

Next, select the ad unit you want to apply the rule to. The dropdown option will automatically pre-fill with all of the ad units you labeled in the “Ad Unit Base Prices” tab.

Then you’ll select your criteria triggers you want applied to the rule. The dropdown options will automatically pre-fill with all of the criteria grouping titles you filled out in the appropriate rule management tabs.

Note that It is ok to leave one of the criteria targeting cells blank if you don’t want it incorporated into your custom rule. Say for instance you want to create a rule that doesn’t include a browser as one of the criteria breakdowns. You can simply leave it blank.

The template has space for 200 different custom price rules. As you know from previous videos, and can easily see from all of the criteria you entered, there will be no way to create custom pricing rules for every combination of every factor (unless you work with a partner like Playwire), so be strategic in the rules you create.

Once you’re done configuring your rules, you’ll jump to the “Custom Price Floor Rules” tab.Here you will find your price floor rules automatically generated for you:

The Rule Title will automatically update to match the rule titles you created in the “Rule Configuration” tab and the Price Floors to accompany all of the criteria you selected will be automatically calculated in the “Price Floor” column.