How to activate data to Google Ad Manager - 360 (GAM360)

Intro

To activate your first-party data from InfoSum to GAM you need to implement Google’s Batch file upload identifiers for audience segments data ingestion process. As part of this process, Google will provide a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket that you can use to set up an integration between GAM and InfoSum. InfoSum can then push your audience segment to this GCS bucket. Once ingested it will be available to use in GAM.

In order to set up GAM you will need to use the following instructions.

You will need a GAM storage bucket:

Prerequisites for activation in GAM.
Setting up the right authentication method
How to manage access to your GAM bucket.

You can then create a Destination and push data to GAM

Create an activation Bunker.
Create a GAM destination
Create your activation segment
Push the activation to GAM

Creating your GCS bucket for GAM

Prerequisites for activation in GAM

Before you can upload the identifiers to GAM, please work with your Google account manager to complete Google’s Batch upload identifiers to audience segments - Prerequisites section before commencing activation through the InfoSum Platform.

Locate and submit your network code. Find your network code in Ad Manager under Admin, then Global settings, and then Network code.
- Find Ad Manager account information
Ensure that you've created an active first-party audience segment with which you want to associate the identifiers. If you don't want this segment to collect users using your own inventory, select "Publisher Managed" as the Population method.
- Create first-party audience segments
- Expect to wait up to 24 hours from the time of segment creation to the time when you can perform a batch upload.
Create a Google Group that contains all Google Accounts that will need access to upload and view files and provide the name of your G Suite Google group to your account manager as part of the feature activation process.
- Create a group & choose group settings
- Note: Google groups that aren't part of G Suite cannot be used to manage Ad Manager storage buckets.

Setting up the right authentication method

InfoSum has two options to authenticate and connect to a GCS bucket, both methods utilise a service account. The below two guides differ in the implementation of authentication however everything regarding the setup of service accounts remains the same.

Where to create the service account

A service account can be created in the context of a user’s account so that it inherits all the same permissions as the user or it can be created by itself and have permissions added by an admin.

Credentials

Using one of the below methods of authentication a JSON config can be created and input in our GCS import connector.

GAM Bucket Ownership

The storage bucket provided by Ad Manager is included in a Google-owned cloud storage project. Therefore you will be unable to assign permissions to your users/service accounts for the bucket because it will not appear under your project list in the Google Developers Console.

How to manage access to your GAM bucket

To manage access to the ad manager storage bucket, you will need to add the email domain of either a user or service account to the Google group provided by your account manager or a google group you have created and provided to your Google account manager.

Method 1 - Create a service account that inherits bucket permissions from a User.

The benefit of this is that the service account will inherit access to the bucket from the user so if the user can already access the bucket no further configuration is needed. If the user cannot access the bucket the admin of the account can give the user access and it will propagate to the service account.

Determine what project contains the bucket you wish to connect with and select it.
Use the account of a user with the required permissions for the bucket and create a service account.
Using one of the above two methods, setup authentication to the Service account.

Method 2 - Create a service account and manually assign permissions.

Alternatively, if you prefer to configure a service account outside of the context of an individual user.

Set up a service account and bucket in a project.
Manually give the service account permission to access the bucket.
Using one of the above two methods, setup authentication to the Service account.

Alternatively, as stated in the above section If you’ve created a new G Suite Google group or have an existing group, you can provide the name of your group to your account manager as part of the feature activation process. They will work with you to activate any feature that uses Ad Manager storage buckets using your existing group.

To set up GCS credentials that can connect to the Ad Manager storage bucket you will need to either:

Add the Google user/service accounts of users who need access to upload and view files to the Google group provided to you by your account manager.
Create a Google Group containing all Google user/service accounts that need access to upload and view files. Provide the name of your G Suite Google group to your account manager as part of the feature activation process.

In addition to the above, you will need to obtain the JSON credentials for your newly created GAM bucket. You can obtain these from the Google Management Interface, whereby you can generate the key file for the service account. This is a JSON file for a service user that allows InfoSum Bunker to access the Google Cloud Storage bucket for export. You do not need to amend this file in any way.

Data activation in InfoSum

Create an activation Bunker

To export your audience segment from InfoSum, you’ll need to publish data to an Activation Bunker.

While normalizing your data for your activation Bunker, please make sure to select, as an output column, one of the identifiers that GAM can ingest:

Publisher Provided IDs (PPIDs)
Mobile Advertising IDs (MAIDs)
Roku IDs, tvOS IDs
Vizio IFAs
Samsung TIFAs
Cookies sourced from Google’s Data transfer “UserId” field.

Create a GAM destination

In order to use GCS bucket, the Destination will need to be created by following the instructions on this page https://support.infosum.com/hc/en-us/articles/18402924002066-Configuring-and-exporting-to-a-GCS-destination

Please set your Destination Path to the desired GAM file path.

The destination is reusable and can be connected to multiple Activation Bunkers.

Create and push your activation segment

You can create an activation segment either using Segment Builder or the Query Tool.

Using Segment Builder

For more information on how to create a segment, see using Segment Builder.

Once the segment is created, click New Activation on the top right corner of Segment Builder.

Choose the dataset you want to use for activation, the output column you want to export and add a Campaign ID to identify your campaign within InfoSum.

Set the Output data column label based on the identifier that is being exported from the activation Bunker. You must set the new column header to one of the following based on Google Ad Manager’s requirements:

For encrypted cookies and encrypted identifiers obtained from Google’s Data Transfer reports use “cookie_encrypted”
For raw Apple IDFAs, use “cookie_idfa”
For raw Android AdIDs, use “cookie_adid”
For raw PPIDs, use “ppid”
For raw Roku IDs, use “cookie_rida”
For raw tvOS IDs, use “cookie_tvos”

Select Add a column of string values to your output data, set the Column Name to “list_id”, and set the Column Value to the corresponding audience segment ID that was created earlier in GAM.

Set the Column Delimiter to comma and click Submit. You’re now ready to connect your GCS bucket to your activation Bunker.

To delete all identifiers from a segment:

You can use the same upload file to delete all identifiers from a segment by adding a column called delete. This deletes all identifiers from the segment in GAM and then a new segment can be pushed to the same segment.

To delete all identifiers from a segment, select Add a column of string values to your output data and define as “list_id” the segment ID from which you want to delete all users. On a new row, set the Column Name to “delete”, and set the Column Value to “1”.

The example below deletes all identifiers in the segment/list with “list_id” 3153490.

Using the Query Tool

To write an activation query, go to the Query Tool and select Activation as your query type. Under the Query Text box, you can see the Settings. Check the Add a column of string values to your output data option, to easily build the CSV file as requested by the GAM ingestion process. Set the Column Name to “list_id” and the Column Value to the corresponding audience segment ID that was created earlier in GAM.

Next, select Override queried column headers with new headers (please contact your Customer Success Representative if override queried column headers are not available). Set the Header to override to the header name of the key that’s to be exported and set the New Column header to one of the following based on Google Ad Manager’s requirements:

For encrypted cookies and encrypted identifiers obtained from Google’s Data Transfer reports use “cookie_encrypted”
For raw Apple IDFAs, use “cookie_idfa”
For raw Android AdIDs, use “cookie_adid”
For raw PPIDs, use “ppid”
For raw Roku IDs, use “cookie_rida”
For raw tvOS IDs, use “cookie_tvos”

Add a Campaign ID to identify your campaign within InfoSum, set the Column Delimiter to comma and click Submit. You’re now ready to connect your GCS bucket to your activation Bunker.

To delete all identifiers from a segment:

You can use the same upload file to delete all identifiers from a segment by adding a column called delete. This deletes all identifiers from the segment in GAM and then a new segment can be pushed to the same segment.

The example below deletes all identifiers in the segment/list with “list_id” 3153490.

Push the activation to GAM

Return to the Activation tab under Activate, and select the campaign you created for the data activation.

At the bottom of the page, you will see a box containing three menu tabs - Details, Export Configuration and Export History.

Under Destination you can now select your created Destination from the dropdown. Or create a new one if necessary using the ‘Create New’ button in the top right.

Verify that GAM is ingesting data correctly

Google suggests users should wait up to 48 hours from the time an audience is activated from InfoSum to the time it will be available in GAM.

Limitations

Due to Google’s rate limiting requirements, you cannot upload more than 1GB per hour and up to 5GB per day.

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