Google Ad Manager Integration

Description

Connect your Google Ad Manager account to TouchBasePro to easily insert adverts directly into your email campaigns to monetise your email marketing.

You will be able to manage all your adverts in Google Ad Manager (GAM), the integration will then automatically pull your adverts from your Google Ads Manager (GAM) account and allow you to insert them into your email campaigns.

You will be responsible for selling the adverts to your customers. TouchBasePro does take part in the selling of advert space.  

Who will make use of this?

Publishers, retailers or content creators that wish to feed ad content into their email campaigns directly from Google Ads Manager in order to monetise them. 

Requirements

1. TouchBasePro account
2. Google Ads Manage account with administrative access
3. Have adverts loaded into your Google Ads Manager account

Getting a Google Ad Manager (GAM) account

GAM accounts are free, however, you are required to have a Google Analytics account as well. You can register for a GAM account here and complete the registration process. It will ask you to link your Analytics account, if you don’t have one, you will be asked to sign up for one. Once signed up, please return to the GAM account and confirm you have access to the Ad Manager console as shown below. 

If you already have a GAM account, please go to the Ad Manager console, go to the admin section, select access & authorisation and confirm that you have administrative access. 

Linking your GAM account to your TouchBasePro account

If you do not have a TouchBasePro account, you can sign up for a free account here.

Once you are logged into your TouchBasePro account go to the left-hand menu, select Campaigns and then Adverts to access the below screen:

Click on the button "Link Your Google Ad Manager Account" and follow the prompts to authorise TouchBasePro access to your advert data. 

Creating adverts in GAM

An advert has 4 main elements:

1. Advertiser
2. Order
3. Line item
4. Creative

We require all 4 of these elements to exist in your account to work with our systems.

How to create an advert:

1. Go to  the GAM console
2. On the left menu select Deliveries and then Orders 
3. Click on the "New order" button
4. Fill in the details of your order with the minimum requirements being "Name" and "Advertiser"
5. Click on "Add line item" at the bottom of the page 
6. Select "Display advert"
7. Provide a useful name for this order 
8. Important: Select "Native content ad (Native)" as your advert type
9. If you have many newsletters or other requirements where you need to categorise adverts, make use of the Labels feature in GAM. This will be imported to TouchBasePro and you will be able to filter by these labels
10. Select your delivery dates and add a quantity of 1. This is to save data into GAM, we do not make use of this quantity. The dates set are used to filter adverts in TouchBasePro. Please note that you can still use adverts in your email campaigns even if it is outside of your delivery settings. 
    
11. Leave out the unused section. We do not require data for line item template, adjust delivery and ad targeting
12. Click save
13. Move to the "Creatives" tab and click on add creative 
14. Select new creative and then select "Native content ad"
15. Enter the settings for the creative
16. You can make use of labels for the creative
    
17. Fill in the required details for the creative. These details will be synchronised to TouchBasePro 
    1. Headline - title of the advert
    2. Image - advert images that will be sized to the layout selected in your email campaign
    3. Body - description of advert or further details. This can be shown to the email recipient 
    4. Call to action - this will become the text on the button in your advert on your email campaign 
    5. Advertise - select the same advertiser as before
    6. You can leave out "deep link click action URL", "Third party impression tracked" and "Third party click tracker"
18. Click save and preview at the bottom of the screen 
19. Activate your creative
    
20. Activate your order
21. Return to the order and click "Approve". You can safely ignore the below warning
    

Synchronisation of ads

The advert will be imported to TouchBasePro. The synchronisation happens every 20 minutes. If you need to synchronise sooner, please go to your TouchBasePro account, select Campaigns and then Adverts and click on the sync icon.

Including adverts in your email campaigns

When designing your campaign, you can add adverts to your campaign by dragging the "Advert" icon into the template editor. 

On the left-hand panel, select the "Select advert" button under Advert Source

A window will open and you can search and filter the results to find your desired advert. Simply click on your advert and it will be inserted into the campaign. 

Layouts

You can choose from one of our eight pre-defined layouts:

You also have the option to create your own layout. This is an advanced feature, and you will need an HTML designer to do this for you.

Custom and ad hoc adverts

In some cases, you may wish to simply include an advert without setting it up in GAM. To do this, include the advert and choose “Custom Advert”

You will then fill in all the details needed and upload the advert image.

Auto-select adverts

In some cases, you may wish for the advert to be selected automatically. Choose “Auto-Select” for this feature and supply settings for us to know how to choose which adverts should show in the campaign.

Reporting

You will be able to access reporting from both TouchBasePro and the Google Ad Manager report export.

TouchBasePro:

Account-wide reports are available.

As well as campaign-level reports

Google Ads Manager:

We make use of the “Comments” Section on GAM. This is due to GAM not allowing any editing or updating of advert metrics. We insert data as a CSV value so that it can be used in Excel easily. 

A day after a campaign has been sent, we need to update fields in GAM, the data we want to push back to GAM is:

1. Total sent (e.g. 10 000)
2. Unique opens (e.g. 200)
3. Unique clicks on advert (e.g. 10)
4. Click-through rate (e.g. 0.05%)

The GAM API allows us to update the "Comments" Field.

We will be putting CSV values into the comments field. As an example using the data above a line item will get these values:

10000,200,10,0.05%

FAQs

Do you supply adverts for us to insert?
No, we do not supply any adverts. 

Do you take a percentage of the advert revenue? 
No revenue is taken by TouchBasePro for the placement of adverts 

Does the serving of adverts affect impression metrics in GAM?

No, GAM metrics are not updated. 

What data do you read and store? 

We read Advertisers, Orders, Lineitems and Creatives.

What do you change and update in GAM? 

We update the comments fields on Orders, Lineitems and Creatives 

Why do I have to select Native ads, why can't I serve my other adverts? 

Email clients do not support video, javascript and some HTML elements. This is why we need to make use of a very basic ad type.  

If you need further information or support regarding integrating your Google Ads Manager account with TouchBasePro, please contact us on support@touchbasepro.com