Navigate Google Ad Manager

Welcome to the Google Ad Manager user interface. In this video, we’re going to take a tour of the main areas that you’ll frequently interact with.

Before exploring the main navigation menu, let’s highlight a few helpful elements of the user interface.

Here, you’ll find your network name and unique, network ID displayed above the navigation. You’ll want to reference these whenever reaching out to Google support.

At the top of your screen, you’ll find a search bar. You can search for anything in your account, such as ad units, line items, creatives, and more.

Next to search is the question mark icon, which provides help content. If you’re searching for a particular help topic, this is an easy way to find results.

The bell icon opens a notifications panel. The number over the bell icon tells you how many new notifications you have. Under the bell icon, you’ll find alerts about important events in Ad Manager, like when a line item is missing a creative. You can control the types of notifications you receive by clicking the gear icon in the notifications panel.

These three dots provide a link to your settings.

The main navigation is made up of several tabs that take you to the different areas within Google Ad Manager.

The Home tab takes you to your dashboards. Each dashboard provides daily snapshots of your network’s Ad Manager and programmatic revenue performance over time and in relation to comparable publishers. These dashboards provide insights when you need them, allowing you to quickly discover significant changes and trends across your network while surfacing new opportunities to maximize revenue.

Ad Manager provides you with four home dashboards. The Overview dashboard displays your overall revenue and performance. Delivery shows a review of your line items and orders that may need attention. Advertisers displays the revenue generated by classified advertisers and Opportunities shows the opportunities and experiments that are available to you.

Under the Sales tab, you can manage all of your Programmatic Direct campaigns. Programmatic Direct automates negotiation and sales of your inventory. Learn more in the course, Explore Programmatic Deals in Ad Manager.

Delivery is where you manage your traditionally sold campaigns, including the ability to forecast for available inventory. Here, you’ll set up orders, line items, and creatives. Learn more about this in the course, Deliver Ads Using Google Ad Manager.

Set up your inventory, or the ad space that you have available to sell by selecting the Inventory tab. Learn how to define your inventory using ad units, placements, and key-values in the Build Inventory and Ad Units course.

In the Protections tab, you have the option to block advertisers, brands, and more. Protect users, publishers, and advertisers while maximizing inventory availability and demand eligibility in a simple, safe, and transparent system.

Within the Reports tab, you’ll use Ad Manager’s Query Tool to create and schedule customized reports.

Query Tool offers the ability to create customized queries using a mix of dimensions and metrics. This allows you to view performance over a specific date range. The Create Reports in Google Ad Manager course provides more details on using the Query Tool.

Billing is where you set up payment settings and view transactions.

The Video tab organizes all of your video needs. This is where you’ll setup and manage feeds to ingest content and associated metadata to Ad Manager. From here you can manage the video content within your network, which includes creating content bundles. You can also apply ad rules that allow you to set when, where, and how ads display within your video content.

You’ll need to set up your administrative needs, users’ access, and other account settings from the Admin tab. The Manage Settings with the Admin Tab course will explain how.

That concludes the tour of the Google Ad Manager 360 user interface. Over the remaining courses, you’ll learn how this platform helps you grow all your digital ad revenues.