The “Authorized Digital Sellers” = “Ads.txt” is a reasonable initiative introduced by the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Tech Lab to support, promote, authenticate and improve the transparency in advertising for online publishers. The main purpose of ads.txt is to protect the programmatic system for both advertisers, publishers to avoid fraud activities that usually occurs in buying & selling ad slots (i.e. ad inventory).
What is the ads.txt & all about? —
People used to search; How to add the ads.txt file to blogger? what is ads.txt? How does it work? How to add Ads.txt file into Blogger? Ads.txt on blogger root directory? How can I implement ads.txt functionality into our Blogger? What kind of problems does Ads.txt solve? How publishers & advertisers can get more advantages with Ads.txt to ad revenue? Do I need to set up ads.txt on my site? How do I implement Ads.txt on the WordPress/Blogger website? What is the ads.txt format? What could be the effect of Ads.txt on Google? How can buyers use ads.txt to verify who is authorized to sell? How to protect your premium inventory with “Ads.txt”? And so on.
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In simple words; The “ADS.TXT” consists a list of publisher accounts authorized by the website owner from which the ads can be shown on the website. It will avoid false ad placements from unknown accounts and significantly help to improve your website security in monetizing your content. It’s a simple idea for the ad publishers to specifically show the buyers who are authorized to sell their ads on the website by using Ads (Authorized Digital Sellers) txt file.
It’s a new innovation that tries to overcome the action of bad players work to get profit from arbitrage (profitable ad slots) ad inventory in the digital marketplace. This Ads.txt tool that can improve advertising system with the genuine ad buyers to root out frauds & to overcome illegitimate sellers who counterfeit ad inventory & spoof domains on programmatic ad exchanges platforms. For example, fraudulent can buy a low-value ad slot on a low-quality content website like xyz.com from the programmatic ad exchange, and then he places it on a premium website, like bbc.com. So with the ads.txt feature, this kind of advertisement will not be displayed on an unauthorized site.
Clearly, such ads.txt as a reasonable effort makes it more challenging for ad fraud scammers to sell counterfeit inventory. This is a single action that is fighting against such frauds (costs more than $40 billion by 2022) and helps to ensure earnings of the publisher by the amount of ad revenue that’s actually meant for them as well as the preventing buyers’ money being grabbed away. The attempt is taken by IAB, and well-known as “Ads.txt” — and I suggest you implement it now. Let’s check out all about ADS.TXT and how you implement it on your website quickly.
What is Ads.Txt?
As discussed above, Ads.txt is a program designed by the IAB intended for reducing the fraud in ad inventory. This solution was specially invented to fight against domain spoofing typically buyers can check if a seller is an authorized and certified source of inventory. This will stop scammers from making money in the digital marketplace by blocking unauthorized inventory sales.
ADS(Authorized Digital Sellers).txt is an approved text file that lists all of the trusted ad networks that are approved to sell the inventory. The purpose is to improve transparency between advertisers & publishers. The plan is designed in a way to eliminate unauthorized illegitimate entities that may be attempting to make ad revenue by showing themselves masked as a premium for getting ads from the exchange. But this Ads.txt act makes it difficult for scammers to make a profit by selling fraudulent inventory.
How does Ads.txt work?
Ads.txt is a file attached to your domain that allows publishers to classify who can serve authentically their ad inventory in front of buyers on your website.
For example; https://www . yourwebsite . com/ads.txt
Ads.txt will automatically generate a text file on your domain to ensure you are only showing ads from approved digital sellers you have authorized on your page. This systematic approach allows publishers to check whom they have authorized by means of qualifying more buyers to reliably buy ad slots on the website.
Advertisers & publishers must require their ad exchange deny bidding requests from the unknown sources that are not listed in an ads.txt file. To prevent buying illegal or false inventory, ad exchange should decline bid requests from the sources which are not listed in an ads.txt file if there is a file of ‘ads.txt’ is present. At some point, the ad exchange may allow specific buyers to refuse using the ad slots from websites that haven’t implemented ads.txt files.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll walk through the steps to create a new ads.txt file. The ads.txt file consists of 4 mandatory fields separated by commas and the number of rows. Each row represents a separate seller account that can be authorized to sell your inventory.
The first field contains the name of the “linked network” or ad network domain of the advertising system that bidders connect to… For Google publisher accounts, the domain is always “google.com”. This is the operational domain of the ad system.
The second field is the “ad network account ID” or publisher’s account ID. This is the identifier associated with the advertising network identified in the first column.
The third field is the “type of account” or relationship.
The value “DIRECT” will be used to indicate that the publisher directly controls the account indicated in column 2 on the system. This tends to mean a direct business contract between advertising system & the publisher.
Alternatively, the value “RESELLER” will be used to indicate that the publisher has authorized another entity to control the account indicated in column 2 and resell their ad slots via the system in column 1.
At last, the fourth field is optional “certification authority ID” – is a unique value assigned by the advertising network in column 1. This means that the publisher has authorized someone else to control the account indicated in column 2 and resell their ad space via the system in column 1.
What’s the difference between “DIRECT” & “RESELLER”?
“DIRECT” shows that the publisher or the content owner has a direct relationship with the advertising system or Ad exchange (such as Adsense). This also indicates that there are no hidden or indirect links between the publisher and the ad network for selling ad inventory.
“RESELLER” shows that another publisher has allowed that account (like Adsense) for selling the ad inventory on the be behalf of the publisher, by another party. This also means that there is an indirect connection between the publisher and the ad network for selling ad inventory.
How To Add Ads.txt To Blogger/WordPress In 2 Min? | Ezoic Ad Optimization
How to Implement Ads.txt into Blogger – Blogger is best in all the way, but some features make it wired to use it. Till now, Blogspot provided us to generate and edit the robots.txt file, but there is no option to implement ads.txt in blogger platform. You can NOT create a file in the root directory from the blogger dashboard. But by quick steps, you can able to implement ads.txt into your domain even you are using Blogger or WordPress system.
The use of ads.txt is not compulsory but is highly recommended to improve the security of your website since it can help protect your brand/ blog/ website from false inventory that is purposely mislabelled as deriving from a specific domain. Moreover, generating Ads.txt by declaring authorized sellers can help you get more advertisers that will increase more ad revenue.
Follow steps to setup ads.txt into blogger/WordPress:
1. Open and create Ezoic account
You must have Ezoic account to add the ads.txt file at your website. Publishers can generate their own ads.txt file directly in the Ezoic Ad platform for Publisher to know who is authorized to sell their inventory. Once an ads.txt file has been generated & hosted at the root level domain, it will be publicly accessible and crawlable by buyers, advertisers, third-party vendors, and exchanges.
Moreover, Ezoic is Google certified program specially designed for you to make more revenue with your Adsense. So you don’t have to worry about Ezoic.
Ezoic allows you to quickly generate and implement ads.txt for your domain.
2. Ads.txt App for website
Once you setup Ezoic program, like Cloudflare and Mediation, you also need to install the Ads.txt app.
Go to add store >> Choose “Ads.txt” >> Click install.
3. Setup Ads.txt
Once you install the ads.txt app; you will get 4 or 5 columns (as shown in image).
Here not only for the Ezoic publisher, but you can also add all your ad networks account IDs independent of Ezoic.
If you are using Google Adsense; you need to add all your info in following ways:
Ad Network Domain >> type “google.com”
Ad Network Account ID >> type your publisher account ID shown in Adsense account settings as “pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”
Account Type >> Choose “DIRECT”
Certification Authority ID (optional) >> Copy-paste “f08c47fec0942fa0” (its same for all Adsense publishers across the globe)
So you will get the result like:
google.com, pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0
Also, you need to add following for reseller account as your Adsense is using Ezoic:
google.com, pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, RESELLER, f08c47fec0942fa0
In case of Media.net publishers;
You need to drop the mail to your account manager to get the ads.txt file content.
He will provide you 3 parts separated by commas like: media.net, 12345, DIRECT, XXXXXX
You just need to add that information accordingly into the ‘ads.txt’ app as shown above.
That’s all.
NOTE: If you are using Ezoic and setting up the Ads.txt, just stay in touch with your account manager for editing the ads.txt to assure you are not affected negatively.
Ads.txt Hoax
What could be the effect of Ads.txt on Google – Many of the users describing that this will affect your ad revenue; I don’t know why but they are misleading the online publishers; maybe they have some hidden purpose.
As I know; without ads.txt you can still able to make money with your Google Adsense, DFA Ad exchange, and most of the other advertising networks with your same content. I repeat implementing ads.txt is not mandatory but it’s good to have it for better security.
OFFICIAL UPDATE: Launched Ads.txt in Blogger Dashboard
If your blogger blog is making money with third-party ad providers or you have manually integrated AdSense in all the pages of your blog, you’ll then required to manually set up the content of the “ads.txt file” as follows.
Setting up an Ads.txt file in blogger blog:
STEP 1: Go to Blogger dashboard
STEP 2: On left-handed menu; choose “Settings”
STEP 3: Click “Search preferences”
STEP 4: You will see new option at the bottom side of right pane “Monetization”
STEP 5: You will see “Custom ads.txt” option to edit.
STEP 6: Add the settings provided by all your 3rd party Ad networks and “Save” settings.
STEP 7: You then able to check the Ads.txt file by going to the URL like “https/–your website domain–.com/ads.txt”
NOTE: The update of Ads.txt in blogger dashboard has the limitation of 10000 characters which is not sufficient for most of the professional bloggers, so suggesting you to try Ezoic tools to use and install Ads.txt in root directory of blogger account.
I think implementing the ads.txt is the best thing to do now because you must know whether you are buying & serving the ads on your site from the advertisers that you are willing to buying from.
I hope this tutorial has been helpful in guiding you on how to implement ads.txt. If in case you have any doubt or have any questions then please do not hesitate to share it via comment section shown below. Anyways thanks for your attention now let’s implement Ads.txt on your site.
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