Use Protections to Manage Ads

Unified protections and you

You can create protections to help you control the ads that appear on your website or app. The Unified Protections feature enables you to block or allow advertisers, brands, certain ad technologies, categories, ad types, and more. It allows you to do this across all your inventory, in one place. 

Explore unified protections

There are three types of protection categories within Google Ad Manager. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Ad content protections

Ad content rules are designed to help you control the kinds of ads that appear on your digital properties. These rules protect you, your users, and your advertisers.

You manage the brand of your websites or apps by blocking or opting into types of ads.

For example, you may choose to block, that is, opt out of ads from specific categories, advertisers or buyers. Or you may choose to opt into allowing certain ad technologies or ad experiences. 

Competition Protections

Competition protections prevent ads from certain advertisers, brands, or categories from appearing next to ads from other advertisers, brands, or categories. Unlike ad content protections, which are commonly used to block entire categories, competition protections allow you to block certain types of ads from appearing only when ads from other specific advertisers, brands, or categories are present.

Setting up these kinds of rules allows you to add value to your advertisers by ensuring they won’t compete for the same users during an ad experience.

Inventory exclusions protections

Inventory exclusions indicate what inventory to exclude from the Open Auction. Inventory exclusion rules allow you to exclude inventory types or targeting values. 

A note on targeting values specific to inventory exclusion protections:  

The targeting values included in an inventory exclusion rule are blocked from the Open Auction. If no targeting values are included in the targeting picker, then all inventory is blocked from the Open Auction.

• Add targeting values to the targeting picker to make sure you’re not excluding all inventory from the Open Auction.
• If you want to include all inventory in the Open Auction, simply don’t add any inventory exclusion rules.

Manage your protections

You can view and manage all of your existing protections in one place by selecting Protections in Ad Manager. Let’s explore the elements of this page together.

Type

This section shows whether the Protection is categorized as an Ad content, Competition, or Inventory exclusion.

Inventory type

Inventory type identifies the kind of inventory or medium in which an ad serves. Examples of inventory type include mobile, video, display, and games.

Blocks

You can apply Blocks to prevent certain types of ads from appearing on your site. Here we show a summary of the count and type of specific applied blocks.

Opt-ins

By default, Ad Manager blocks ads belonging to certain restricted categories or ad experiences, using certain ad technologies, or appearing in certain languages. To allow them to run on your site, you must explicitly enable them using Opt-ins.

Status

You can pause or resume a protection by changing its Status to Inactive or Active, respectively.