Platform Overview

Welcome to the redesigned ad:personam Self-Serve DSP. If you're coming from the previous version of the platform, this guide will help you understand how everything is organised now — what has changed, what stays the same, and how the different objects in your account relate to each other.

What Has Changed

The new ad:personam platform introduces a cleaner, more intuitive structure. Here are the key differences you'll notice:

• Simplified navigation — Advertisers, campaigns, and line items now follow a clear parent-child hierarchy. No more hunting through disconnected screens.
• Campaign is a container, not a budget holder — Campaigns no longer carry their own spend budget. Budget lives on the line item, where it directly controls delivery and billing.
• Line items are your strategy objects — All bidding, targeting, pacing, and budget decisions happen at the line item level. This gives you more granular control over how each slice of your campaign performs.
• Creatives live under campaigns — You upload creatives at the campaign level and then publish them to one or more line items via tags. This means one creative can serve across multiple line items without duplicating files.
• Advertiser-level assets — Targeting lists, inventory source lists, and conversion pixels are set up once at the advertiser level and reused across any campaign or line item under that advertiser.

If you previously managed budgets at the campaign level, you'll now set budgets directly on each line item. This is more flexible — different line items within the same campaign can have completely different budgets, bidding strategies, and flight dates.

The Object Hierarchy

Everything in ad:personam is organised in a clear hierarchy:

Advertiser
  ├── Campaign
  │     ├── Creative (the actual ad)
  │     └── Line Item (budget, targeting, bidding)
  │           └── Tag ← links Creative to Line Item
  │
  ├── Targeting Lists (domain & app lists)
  ├── Inventory Source Lists
  └── Conversion Pixels

Each level serves a distinct purpose. Let's walk through them.

Advertiser

An advertiser is your top-level account — the container for everything related to a specific brand or business. It's the first thing you create when you start using ad:personam.

What belongs to an advertiser

Key properties

• Name — Your brand or business name
• Timezone — Used for scheduling and reporting
• Currency — EUR, USD, or GBP — sets the currency for all budgets and invoicing under this advertiser
• Website URL — Your brand's primary domain

All assets under an advertiser are isolated. Targeting lists, creatives, and pixels from one advertiser cannot be used by another. This ensures complete data separation — especially important for agencies managing multiple clients.

Campaign

A campaign is a logical grouping of line items and creatives. Think of it as a folder that defines the shared boundaries for everything inside it.

What a campaign controls

Campaigns set the outer boundaries that apply to all child line items:

What a campaign does NOT control

• Budget — There is no campaign-level budget. Each line item manages its own spend.
• Targeting — Geo, audience, device, and inventory targeting are configured per line item.
• Bidding — CPM, CPC, and CPA strategies are set at the line item level.

How to think about campaigns

Campaigns are best used to group line items that share a common context. Here are practical examples:

Group by region:

Advertiser: Acme Corp
  └── Campaign: North America (timezone: America/New_York)
        ├── Line Item: US Display — Prospecting
        ├── Line Item: US Display — Retargeting
        └── Line Item: Canada Video — Brand Awareness

Group by brand safety requirements:

Advertiser: Acme Corp
  └── Campaign: Display & Video (brand safety: IAS_DESKTOP_WEB_DISPLAY + IAS_DESKTOP_WEB_VIDEO)
        ├── Line Item: Display — Open Exchange
        └── Line Item: Video — Premium Publishers

Brand safety presets are selected per campaign based on the types of line items you plan to run:

If your campaign only contains display line items, adding IAS_DESKTOP_WEB_DISPLAY alone is sufficient. If it contains both display and video, add both the display and video presets.

Cost note: Each brand safety preset adds a data cost of approximately $0.05 CPM to every impression. Avoid stacking too many presets on a single campaign — only enable the ones that match your actual line item types to keep data costs under control.

Group by flight period:

Advertiser: Acme Corp
  └── Campaign: Summer 2026 (flight: June 1 – September 30)
        ├── Line Item: July Flight (July 1–31, budget: €5,000)
        ├── Line Item: August Flight (Aug 1–31, budget: €7,500)
        └── Line Item: September Flight (Sep 1–30, budget: €3,000)

In the last example, each line item has its own flight dates and budget within the campaign's overall window. The campaign's end date acts as a hard boundary — no line item can run beyond it.

Line Item

The line item is where your advertising strategy comes to life. It's the most important object in the platform — this is where you define what you're willing to pay, who you want to reach, and how your budget is spent.

What a line item controls

Quick-apply tip: You can attach a targeting list or an inventory source list directly to a line item without opening the full line item editor. This is especially useful for quick optimisation — for example, applying a domain blocklist to a live line item in just a few clicks.

Budget and billing

The line item budget is the only budget that matters for spend. When your line item wins an auction and serves an ad, the cost is deducted from this budget. At the end of the billing cycle, your line item spend is what appears on your invoice or is deducted from your credit balance.

Pausing and status

You can pause a line item at any time to stop delivery without losing your configuration. Resuming it picks up where you left off. Line items also have automatic statuses:

• Active — Running and eligible to serve
• Paused — Manually paused by you
• Pending — Scheduled to start in the future
• Expired — Flight dates have passed

Creatives and Tags

Creatives

A creative is the actual ad content — a banner image, an HTML5 animation, a video file, or an audio clip. Creatives are uploaded at the campaign level and have their own properties:

• Name — A label for easy identification
• Size — Dimensions in pixels (e.g. 300×250, 728×90 for display)
• Click URL — The default landing page users visit when they click with the ad
• Status — Active, Paused, or Deleted

Tags: connecting creatives to line items

Uploading a creative doesn't automatically make it serve. To deliver an ad, you need to publish the creative to a line item. This creates a tag — the link between a creative and a line item.

Campaign
  ├── Creative: "Summer Banner 300x250"
  │
  ├── Line Item: "US Display — Prospecting"
  │     └── Tag → "Summer Banner 300x250"
  │
  └── Line Item: "US Display — Retargeting"
        └── Tag → "Summer Banner 300x250" (different landing page)

When a line item wins a bid in a real-time auction, the tag tells the ad server which creative to show.

Tag-level configuration

Each tag can override or extend the creative's default settings for its specific line item:

This means you can publish the same creative to multiple line items with different landing pages, different tracking pixels, or different active states — without duplicating the creative file itself.

Many-to-many flexibility

• A single creative can be published to multiple line items
• A single line item can have multiple creatives attached
• Each pairing (tag) has its own independent configuration

Advertiser-Level Assets

Some assets are created once at the advertiser level and can be reused across any campaign or line item under that advertiser.

Targeting Lists

Targeting lists let you control where your ads appear by specifying domains or apps. There are two types:

• Allowlists — Your ads will only appear on the domains or apps in this list
• Blocklists — Your ads will never appear on the domains or apps in this list

Each entry in a targeting list can include a bid multiplier — a percentage adjustment to your base bid for that specific domain or app. For example, a multiplier of 1.25 increases your bid by 25% on high-performing sites.

Targeting lists support two resource types:

• Domain lists — For web inventory (e.g., news.example.com, sports.example.com)
• App lists — For in-app inventory

Once created, a targeting list can be applied to any line item under the same advertiser.

Inventory Source Lists

Inventory source lists are curated collections of ad exchanges and publishers (SSPs). They let you define:

• Which inventory sources to bid on
• Whether to buy via open exchange or private deals only
• A bid multiplier per source to prioritise high-quality inventory
• Specific deal IDs and bid prices for private marketplace deals

Create an inventory source list once, then apply it to multiple line items — no need to reconfigure sources every time you create a new line item.

Conversion Pixels

Conversion pixels track user actions on your website — purchases, sign-ups, form submissions, or any other event you want to measure. ad:personam provides two types of tracking pixels:

• Universal Pixel — Installed globally on all pages of your website. It tracks page views for building remarketing audiences and enables retargeting.
• Conversion Pixels — Placed on specific pages (e.g., a "thank you" page) to fire named events when a conversion happens.

Conversion data feeds back into line item optimisation. When you use a CPA bidding strategy, the system uses your conversion pixel data to automatically optimise bids toward users most likely to convert.

Putting It All Together

Here's a complete example of how a typical account might be structured:

Advertiser: Acme Corp (EUR, Europe/Berlin)
  │
  ├── Targeting Lists
  │     ├── "Premium News Sites" (domain allowlist, 45 domains)
  │     └── "Brand Safety Blocklist" (domain blocklist, 200 domains)
  │
  ├── Inventory Source Lists
  │     └── "Preferred Exchanges" (3 SSPs with bid multipliers)
  │
  ├── Conversion Pixels
  │     ├── Universal Pixel (all pages — retargeting)
  │     └── "Purchase Complete" (conversion event on checkout page)
  │
  ├── Campaign: Summer Sale 2026 (Jun 1 – Aug 31)
  │     ├── Creative: "Summer Banner 300x250"
  │     ├── Creative: "Summer Banner 728x90"
  │     ├── Line Item: June Flight (€5,000, CPM, Germany)
  │     │     ├── Tag → "Summer Banner 300x250"
  │     │     └── Tag → "Summer Banner 728x90"
  │     └── Line Item: July Flight (€7,500, CPA, DACH region)
  │           ├── Tag → "Summer Banner 300x250" (different landing page)
  │           └── Tag → "Summer Banner 728x90"
  │
  └── Campaign: Always-On Retargeting (Jan 1 – Dec 31)
        ├── Creative: "Retargeting Banner 300x250"
        └── Line Item: Retargeting — All Markets (€2,000/month, CPM)
              └── Tag → "Retargeting Banner 300x250"

Quick Reference

Next Steps

• Create your first advertiser — Set up your brand profile with the correct timezone and currency
• Set up conversion tracking — Install the universal pixel on your website and create conversion events
• Build your first campaign — Choose a campaign type and add line items with your targeting and budget
• Upload creatives and publish — Upload your ad files, then publish them to your line items to start serving