Advertisers use pre-bid targeting to ensure higher media quality and ad targeting that aligns with the brand’s standards. When you bid on an ad placement, verification partners like DoubleVerify (DV) and Integral Ad Science (IAS) determine whether or not it’s appropriate for the brand based on a predetermined set of criteria that you define. This verification is performed on an impression-by-impression basis to help ensure you’re not eliminating entire sites or publications unnecessarily.

The predetermined rules can apply to several factors:

You can create your own pre-bid audiences on the IQM platform. Pre-bid audiences allow you to select multiple pre-bid segments and group them together. We recommend creating a pre-bid audience when you want to use the same set of pre-bid segments across multiple campaigns. You can add the audience to each of those campaigns instead of manually selecting and adding segments for each campaign.

Review Create or manage a pre-bid audience for instructions, or continue reading for more information on fraud and IVT, brand safety, and viewability pre-bid segments.

When you target fraud and IVT pre-bid segments, you take a proactive approach to identifying and preventing false online traffic before an ad impression is served. Verification partners analyze real-time data points to detect fraudulent activity and block it during the bidding process. This pre-bid detection means you can save resources that would have otherwise been wasted on non-human activity.

We currently partner with DoubleVerify (DV) and Integral Ad Science (IAS) for fraud and IVT pre-bid targeting.

DV identifies a range of IVT behaviors including fraud bots, non-human data center traffic, hijacked devices, and emulators. Fraud and IVT segments are used to exclude sites or apps based on the percentage of fraud or IVT detected, ranging from insufficient data to 100% IVT. They also help you avoid invalid traffic, including sites with high fraud percentages or impressions with missing IP addresses.

Refer to DoubleVerify (DV) pre-bid segments for a list of the fraud and IVT segments that you can target, and their descriptions, and review Create or manage a pre-bid audience for more details on how to target them in the IQM platform.

When you target brand safety and suitability segments, you ensure that your ads will display within environments that align with the brand’s values. Verification partners evaluate content context, keywords, and other factors to determine the appropriateness of each ad placement.

We currently partner with DoubleVerify (DV) for brand safety and suitability pre-bid targeting, and Integral Ad Science (IAS) for brand safety pre-bid targeting.

DV segments identify impressions for exclusion targeting based on a variety of brand safety categories. Target DV brand safety and suitability segments to exclude sites or apps based on their risk level, ranging from moderate to severe, age rating, or consumer-review rating. You can also exclude them based on whether the content is unknown or unrated, or related to copyright infringement or malware.

Refer to DoubleVerify (DV) pre-bid segments for a list of available brand safety segments and their descriptions, and review Create or manage a pre-bid audience for more details on how to target them in the IQM platform.

Verification partners ensure that ad impressions are viewable by real humans. Viewability pre-bid segments define the percentage of time that ads were historically visible on a particular site or app. For example, targeting an “All Sizes - 70% or Higher Viewability Rate” pre-bid segment increases the likelihood that the campaign’s ads will achieve 70% viewability. In this example, this likelihood is based on the fact that 70% of the ads on the sites were visible in the past.

We currently partner with DoubleVerify (DV) and Integral Ad Science (IAS) for display viewability and video viewability pre-bid targeting.

DV viewability segments identify impressions based on historical display-ad and video-ad viewability performance relative to all measured impressions. Add DV display viewability segments to target rate-based tiers for specific ad sizes (leaderboards, medium rectangles, and skyscrapers) or all ad sizes. A rate-based tier uses historical data to predict whether the site or app will have a viewability rate of a certain percentage or higher.

Refer to DoubleVerify (DV) pre-bid segments for a list of available display viewability pre-bid segments and their descriptions, and review Create or manage a pre-bid audience for more details on how to target them in the IQM platform.

Add DV video viewability segments to target sites or apps based on their historical viewability performance, player sizes, and CTV on-screen-environment certification.

Refer to DoubleVerify (DV) pre-bid segments for a list of available video viewability pre-bid segments and their descriptions, and review Create or manage a pre-bid audience for more details on how to target them in the IQM platform.

You may encounter “Unknown,” “Aggregated,” or “Individual” segment types while targeting pre-bid segments. Refer to their definitions below for more information.

You’ll notice that the IQM platform doesn’t list prices for individual pre-bid segments. Instead, those prices are listed at the category and subcategory levels. For example, you will see a price next to Brand Safety - Display, but not next to options like Avoid high-risk adult content pages on Desktop or Mobile Web or Avoid high risk hate speech content pages on Desktop or Mobile Web. That’s because each listed price represents the total cost of the segments within that category. In other words, you’ll pay that particular category’s listed CPM price whether you target one or several pre-bid segments within that same category.

There's no cost associated with adding pre-bid segments to a pre-bid audience. The listed CPM prices will apply once you add the pre-bid audience and/or individual pre-bid segments to a campaign and it begins spending.

Refer to the table below to review a list of scenarios and how those pre-bid audience selections would be charged.