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) 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 Suitability, Viewability, and Supply Refinement 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) 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 suitability 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 suitability pre-bid targeting.

DV segments identify impressions for exclusion targeting based on a variety of brand suitability categories. Target DV brand 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 suitability 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) 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.

When you target Supply Refinement pre-bid segments, you take a proactive approach to identifying and preventing low-value inventory before an ad impression is served. Verification partners analyze real-time data points to detect Made For Advertising (MFA) supply and other low-value or cluttered inventory, and block it during the bidding process. This pre-bid detection means you can improve media quality and save resources that would have otherwise been wasted on subpar placements.

We currently partner with DoubleVerify (DV) for Supply Refinement pre-bid targeting.

Add DV Supply Refinement segments to identify and exclude low-value web inventory such as Low Quality Generative AI (GenAI) websites, placements featuring Ad Clutter, and Made For Advertising (MFA) supply across a number of risk tiers.

Refer to DoubleVerify (DV) pre-bid segments for a list of available Supply Refinement 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.

MFA sites are designed to maximize scale and profitability. The tradeoff is that these sites offer a poor consumer experience and little opportunity for impacting user behavior. In other words, they’re just suitable enough to appear on brand inclusion lists, but offer little value to advertisers.

While a standard, industry-approved definition for MFA has yet to be defined, ad verification partners look to the following signals to help identify and exclude MFA inventory:

Targeting MFA pre-bid segments helps ensure that you invest in legitimate ad placements that can impact consumer behavior–not low-quality websites designed solely for generating ad revenue.

GenAI refers to AI engines that can create new ideas. These ideas are presented in the form of conversations; stories; images, video, and audio assets; programming language; and more.

GenAI websites can present risks concerning brand suitability, low-quality content, and wasted ad spend:

Targeting Low Quality GenAI pre-bid segments helps ensure that you avoid dedicating media spend to ad environments that damage the brand’s reputation and offer little to no real value to consumers.

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 Suitability - 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.

Each pre-bid segment category (Brand Suitability, Fraud & IVT, Viewability, Supply Refinement) is creative agnostic. Note, however, that the IQM platform supports one creative format per campaign. This means that if you select multiple pre-bid segment formats (Display, Video), they won’t be targeted in this manner. Choose only one format for each Pre-bid audience to avoid incurring extra charges. Review Target Pre-bid audiences or pre-bid segments for step-by-step instructions.

Pre-bid audiences are executed differently for Native campaigns. Refer to Creative format compatibility - Native campaigns for more details.

Each pre-bid segment category (Brand Suitability, Fraud & IVT, Viewability, Supply Refinement) includes both Display and Video segments that you can select based on your campaign criteria. Since a single Native campaign can target both Native Display and Native Video creatives, they can include both Display and Video pre-bid segments.

Native campaigns targeting only one Native format (Native Display, Native Video) should only target Pre-bid audience segments of the same format. Campaigns targeting both Native Display and Native Video pre-bid segments will only be charged based on the segment type that matches the served creative’s format.