Set up Prebid Delivery items in your GAM
Last edited: 2025/05/06
Prebid Stack requires implementation in Google Ad Manager (GAM). This includes creating Delivery items: Advertiser, Orders, Line Items, and Creatives in your GAM. These must be set up separately for:
- Banner & Outstream Video
- Instream Video
- Native
Alternatively, you can enable Header Bidding Trafficking (requires GAM 360 & supports only selected Bidders).
Why is this needed?
Prebid Stack sends bid information (including the price) as key values to Google Publisher Tag (GPT) on the page. GPT then passes this data to Google Ad Manager (GAM) using query string parameters.
In GAM, Line Items are set up to target these key values. If GAM chooses Prebid as the winner, it sends a signal back to Prebid Stack, which then displays the winning creative on the site.
Setting up Prebid Stack delivery items in GAM
You don’t need to setup Prebid Delivery items if you use GAM 360 and enable Header Bidding Trafficking. How to do it is explained in Google Ad Manager documentation (link). Alternatively, you can refer to Prebid documentation (link).
If not all Bidders you want to use are available with Header Bidding Trafficking, please follow the implementation explained for GAM Small Business and create Orders/Line items for implementation.
If you want to ensure full support for all Bidders available in Prebid, or if you are using GAM Small Business, please complete the following steps:
- Go to Global setup > GAM connection: Setup Prebid Stack in GAM
- Use the toggle switches to select which Media Types you want to create Prebid Delivery items for in your GAM. You can also optionally customize their settings:
- for Banner & outstream video and Native Media Types:
- Creative Template ID to be used for Creatives for these Media Types
- for Instream video and Native Media Type:
- VAST url
- Duration (in seconds)
- jsdelivr (toggle to = <on> if you use jsdelivr CDN)
- Click ‘Start’ and wait for the process to complete.
- Once the setup is complete, you will see the time and date of the successful setup.
Also, make sure that your account hasn’t reached Google Ad Manager limits for Line Items, Orders, or Key Values.
What exactly is done in your GAM?
Creating an Advertiser
Firstly, we create an advertiser, because all line items and creatives must be associated with an advertiser. An advertiser named “YIELDBIRD” is created to associate the necessary elements with it.
Creating Prebid Orders
Due to the limit of 450 line items per order the script creates 6 orders in total (2079 line items in total are necessary).
When it comes to Start and End date, you typically do not include an end date in your line items. That’s why our bot sets the End date to “Unlimited” in GAM, and the Start date is set to begin immediately.
Creating Prebid Line items
Line items must cover all yb_hb_pb values (2079). One line item per one yb_hb_pb value.
- Line item priority - because header bidding partners return prices, set the line item type to price priority to enable them to compete on price
- Line item creative placeholders - all sizes you are using on your websites
- Rate - same as yb_hb_pb values
- Line item currency - the same as specified in Prebid Stack
- Set display creatives to one or more since we’ll have one or more creatives attached to this line item
Adding Creatives to Line items
All Line Items will be linked to the appropriate general Prebid creatives.