Google Ad Manager has the flexibility to manage your entire digital ads business, including the ability to connect with other technology solutions. In order to do this, many partners employ the Google Ad Manager API to connect the data dots—and help make their businesses more effective and efficient. Ad Manager’s API capabilities allow publishers to build applications that interact directly with their platform accounts, and many publishers are already using them in a variety of ways.
For example, automating common workflows can save time and resources so that you don’t have to make changes manually. Or you can programmatically access your data, giving you the flexibility to populate custom dashboards or interfaces. And if you use the API to optimize your inventory based on the most up-to-date data, you can increase efficiency and help you get the most out of the ads you serve.
Here are five ways you can put the Ad Manager API to work to improve your business:
Automate data pulls for your external analytics tools
With the Ad Manager API, you can run reports that return a machine readable data file. This means that you can write an application that fetches your network’s reporting data, then feed that data into any analytics tools your business uses for up-to-date and actionable insights.
Many publishers have built reporting applications that run on a regular schedule so their data pipeline always has the most recent data. An example pipeline might be one that fetches Ad Manager reporting data via the API and writes the results to a database. Your business intelligence software can then read the data, combine it with your other business data, perform some analysis, and send out a summary email to interested parties.
Report and manage your key-values in bulk to optimize ad offerings
Key-values can give you more control over how you configure ads on your site. You can use them to identify pages, specific parts of a page, or other ad inventory. In order to report on key-values, each key-value must be added to your Ad Manager network and be marked as reportable. Using the API to keep these key-values updated can save a lot of time over entering them all manually.
Run inventory experiments with flexible forecasting
Monitoring your historical performance through reporting is only half of your optimization story. With the Ad Manager API, you can also evaluate future performance by running forecasts on existing and hypothetical line items. For example, you can run forecast simulations on a number of different line items that serve on different days and with different targeting configurations to compare how they stack up against each other.
Take a snapshot of your ad network
Sometimes it’s useful to have a local snapshot of your network’s orders, line items, etc. You can use this snapshot for quicker analyses since you can keep your data where your analytics are running, whether that’s on your in-house servers or in the cloud. Use the API to fetch only the most recently updated entities so that your snapshot stays as fresh as you need it.
Build a custom interface for your business
Perhaps you have an internal process that you’d like to streamline with a custom user interface or you have intelligence and analytics you’d like to sell to others. The Ad Manager API can connect your own network data or the data from other networks that grant your application access to a custom interface you build. The API offers read and write access to just about any entity you can access in the Ad Manager dashboard, giving you a range of configuration possibilities.
If you’re interested in building an Ad Manager API integration, you’ll find many resources on our developer documentation. We offer libraries to make getting started easy with support for Java, Python, PHP, .NET, and Ruby.
And if you have a development team that’s working on Ad Manager API integrations already, we host several Ad Manager Developer Workshops to take your integration to the next level. The next opportunity will be our London event on September 26, 2019.