Set up your ad inventory

How the supply side fits together — sites, zones, placements and ad tags — and the fastest path from an empty account to a serving ad slot.

How-to network manager publisher admin Account → Publishers

Everything you sell — a banner slot on a website, a video slot in a player, a native feed in an app — lives under the Publishers tab as a three-level tree: Site → Zone → Placement. This page explains what each level is for and walks the shortest path from an empty account to a placement that returns ads.

Publishers tab showing the site, zone and placement tree

Who this is for

Network managers, publishers and admins who manage supply. A publisher builds and runs the tree; a network manager does the same and sets the money and traffic rules on top of it — see Per-role notes.

Prerequisites

An account whose role holds the Inventory Create permission — the stock Publisher role does; the rights of a network-manager role are whatever your network administrator set in Roles.
For serving real traffic later: at least one advertiser with a campaign and a banner on the demand side, linked to your placement directly or through Rules.

What each level does

Level	What it represents	What you configure there
Site	One website or app property	Domain/bundle, categories, approval state, revenue share, pricing, limits, CPM threshold, RTB, payments, shares
Zone	A logical group of placements inside a site (e.g. “Homepage”, “Article pages”)	Name, pre-targeting, RTB, zone rules
Placement	The actual ad slot — the only level that produces an ad tag	Type (display / video / native / …), size where the type has one, ad tags, pricing, capping, linked banners, everything serving-related

Ads never serve from a site or a zone directly; they serve from placements. The upper levels exist for organization, reporting and settings that cascade over many placements (pre-targeting set on a site filters traffic for every placement under it).

Steps: from empty account to a serving slot

Go to Account → Publishers and click New site in the tree’s action rail. Fill in the name and URL (or app bundle) and save — see Create and edit a site.
On the saved site, click Add new zone, name it and save — see Work with zones.
On the zone, open Add new placement… and pick the placement type that matches the slot you are selling — the type list and a decision table are in Create a placement.
Fill in the basic info and save. The page reloads as the full placement editor, and — on the types that have tags — gains the Ad tags & API card. Only Site and Email placements require a size; four of the eight types have no size field at all.
Copy the tag from Ad tags & API (which tag tabs you see depends on your role) and put it on your page — see Ad tags, invocation codes and the API.
Make sure demand can reach the placement: link banners on the Linked Banners card, or enable Matching Rules so eligible banners link automatically.

Note: the product nudges you along this chain. A site with zero zones and a zone with zero placements show a setup banner with a one-click “create” action; a placement with no linked banners and Rules off shows a serving-status warning in its header.

Corner cases and gotchas

Corner case: creating entities does not make ads appear. A placement serves only when at least one active, size-compatible banner is linked to it (directly or via Rules) and no targeting/capping/limit blocks the request. If the tag is on the page but nothing renders, start with Ads are not serving.

Corner case: the placement type is chosen at creation time and can never be changed. If you picked the wrong type, create a new placement and delete the old one.

Corner case: a placement switched off shows no tag. Turning Active off hides the Placement key and the whole Ad tags & API card straight away — before you save — because a paused placement serves nothing to install. Turn it back on to get them back.

Per-role notes

Publisher — builds the whole tree and edits basic info, linked banners and sharing; the money and traffic-rule cards (pricing, revenue share, limits, RTB, matching rules) appear only if your network administrator grants them.
Network manager — the same tree plus those cards: pre-targeting, OpenRTB, revenue share, pricing, limits and matching rules.
Administrator — has no inventory tree; switch into a network user to work on sites, zones and placements.
Can View share — every card is read-only; ask the owner for Can Edit.

Exact grants: see User roles.