Creatives

  • The creatives resource is used to manage creatives in Real-time Bidding, allowing you to submit, view the status of, and update creatives.

  • Creatives must be reviewed to ensure compliance with Google policies and publisher controls before they can serve.

  • The creative life cycle involves creation, review, activation, modification, and deactivation.

  • Creatives are reviewed in about 30 minutes and must be approved to be used in bids.

In Real-time Bidding, bidders compete in an auction to place creatives for a given impression. You can use the creatives resource to manage your creatives. Here are some ways you can use the creatives resource:

  • Submit new creatives for review
  • View the status of existing creatives
  • Update existing creatives

Creatives from Authorized Buyers must be reviewed to ensure they do the following before they can serve:

You can also review the status of creatives for associated buyer accounts through a Google Cloud Pub/Sub subscription.

Here are the steps in the life cycle of a creative:

  1. Creation: You can use buyers.creatives.create to submit a creative for review.

  2. Review: Creatives must be reviewed before they can serve. The review process takes about 30 minutes.

    If you've configured your account to watch for creative status changes, a message is logged to a corresponding Google Cloud Pub/Sub subscription for every creative status change.

  3. Activation: Creatives are active immediately after approval. Active creatives can be placed in bid responses. Bids placed with disapproved creatives are filtered from the auction.

  4. Modification: After review, you can use buyers.creatives.patch, to update an existing creative. This automatically resubmits the creative for review.

  5. Deactivation: Creatives become inactive after being unused for 15 days. Inactive creatives aren't returned by the API. You can reactivate a creative by placing a bid with it.