System maximums and limits

Google Ad Manager enforces the following limits to ensure system stability:

• Monitor your network's maximums and limits
• Delivery, inventory and key-values, reporting, and MCM
• Limits on the use of line items
• Ad units, key-values, tagging, and inventory
• Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI)
• Reports
• Privacy & messaging
• Teams and network administration

Monitor your network's maximums and limits

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Click Admin, then Global settings, and then Limits.

Limits in the dasard followed by a number in bold text are network-wide limits (for example: 100,000 | 6,000 current). The number in bold represents the number that the network currently has. Those without a number in bold are local limits, listed for reference. If the limit in the table does not match the limit in this article, an exception may apply.

If your network uses Teams, only members of the "All entities" Team can view the Limits dasard.

Delivery, inventory and key-values, reporting, and MCM

Delivery

^{* Avoid approving or copying more than 50 line items at the same time to prevent errors.
** Learn more about line item priorities.}

Inventory and key-values

* You must change the Apps page filter from the default "All visible apps" value to the "All apps" value in order to see all Apps that contribute to your network limit.

** All active values are listed when viewing a key in Google Ad Manager for both keys that have pre-defined values and keys that have dynamic values. A value is active until/unless it is deleted.

Multiple Customer Management (MCM)

Reporting

Yield groups

Limits on the use of line items

You can use line items to help manage orders. Each line item type supports specific use cases. The following requirements ensure that all equivalent demand sources are treated the same and that Google’s ability to make changes that benefit all publishers is maintained.

Unless otherwise authorized by Google via a contract amendment, you can only use line items for the specific purposes described here. Any other use will be treated as invalid activity.

• Sponsorship and Standard: these line items can only be used to represent guaranteed demand. For example, use these to represent a direct advertiser deal with a fixed price and guaranteed volume.
• Price Priority, Bulk and Network: these line items can only be used to represent non-guaranteed demand. For example, use these to represent third-party ad networks or exchanges.
• House: these line items can only be used to represent demand where you, the Ad Manager account holder, own the product or service being advertised.

Note that for ad serving and to enforce limits on line items requirements:

• Price Priority, Bulk and Network line items that don't compete on price in the unified auction (such as line items with a zero rate and no Value CPM) are treated as House line items.
• Any line item type can be used to represent non-revenue generating demand (for example, pro-bono).

Active line items

The count of active line items includes creatives with creative-level targeting assigned and any line item that:

• is capable of being delivered
• has a status of "ready" or "delivering"
• has start date of today or earlier
• has an end date of today or later

To avoid reaching this limit, consider deactivating line items that are active, but not delivering.

Learn more about how to find line items in Ad Manager.

Targeted criteria per line item

In general, what you see in the targeting expression counts toward the limit.

• Placement targeting: Each placement counts as one targeting criteria, even if the placement itself contains more than one ad unit.
• Day/Time targeting: If you use day/time targeting, the contiguous active blocks for each day of the week count as one criteria toward the total targeting criteria limit.

  If you had a line item that runs from 3pm-7pm each day, it would count as 7 targeting criteria (one targeting parameter times seven days). If you had a line item with 11am-1pm and 2pm - 5pm blocks on weekdays, it would count as 10 targeting criteria (2 active blocks for each day of 5 days).

• Key-values: Each key-value pair counts as one targeting criteria toward the limit. If the expression uses match types, like key is not ~value*, each key to match type value is counted as one targeting criteria toward the limit.
• User domains: Each user domain counts as one targeting criteria toward the limit.

Frequency capping doesn't count toward the targeting criteria limit.

At serving, up to 50 networks are chosen as part of the mediation chain sent to the SDK. Building longer chains risks greater latency, since additional sequential callouts are required.

Ad units, key-values, tagging, and inventory

Ad units

Placements

Key-values

Network settings

Protections

Publisher Provided Signals (PPS) ^(Beta) 

Audience

Tagging

URLs

Unified Pricing rules

• Ad unit codes can be up to 100 characters in length and must be unique.
• Only letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens, periods, asterisks, forward slashes, backslashes, exclamation marks, left angle brackets, colons, and parentheses are allowed.

Tagging and key-values

An ad request URL has a character limit, depending on the tag type, which may limit the number of key-values.

Google Publisher Tags use the HTTP GET method to request ads, which limits the number of bytes that can be passed with each request. Ad tags are limited to 61,440 characters per request.

You can include a maximum of 30 ad slots per SRA (single request architecture) request. If you're using SRA, limit the number of ad slots in your requests and ensure that you only call defineSlot() when you also call display().

Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI)

Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) scales with the millions of viewers who watch live TV. To protect Google's infrastructure, Google DAI has soft limits in place that can be adjusted by reaching out to your account team.

Prepare to run large live events and ensure that the Best practices for DAI backup streams are implemented, and review the Powering live events with Ad Manager's Dynamic Ad Insertion blog post.

Reports

_{* There is no limit to the number of metrics you can add to a report, but processing time slows as you add more metrics.}

Report exports

Teams and network administration

Privacy & messaging

Limits on rapid item creation

Ad Manager monitors networks to ensure that technical glitches aren't causing runaway creation of orders, line items, creatives, ad units, placements, or advertisers. In such cases, to protect your network, Ad Manager places a temporary limit on the creation of new items.

For example, if an external program that uses the Ad Manager API to connect to your network creates thousands of new orders in a very short time period, it's probably an error. These temporary limits can be imposed even if the rapid creation hasn't violated any of the numerical limits listed above.

Unpredictable traffic spikes

Publishers sending an unusual amount of increased traffic may experience elevated latency to handle the unexpected spike in traffic. 

We spread the additional traffic across multiple regions that are below peak in order to handle the increase in traffic, which could result in additional latency.