Companion & Competitive Positioning

Competitive positioning prevents a certain ad from showing on the same page with another ad. Companion positioning, or roadblocking, tries to show 2 different ads together on the same page. The two ads should be linked by a companion/competitive positioning restriction. Other terms include tandem ad serving, tandem creatives, roadblocks, and site takeovers.

Setup

• Click on an ad name
• Select "Restrictions" tab, click "Add"
• Choose the type to be "Companion/Competitive Positioning"
• Choose the other ad that you want to show on the same page (companion), or don't want to show on the same page (competitive)

Multiple Ads

If you have multiple ads and do not want them to appear on the same page, you can apply competitive restrictions to the multiple ad pairs. For your convenience and to save you time, you can link them to one group, select tab "Restrictions \ Ad Restrictions" and click on "Apply competitive positioning to all active ads in this group". This tool will add competitive restrictions to all ads within the group so that only one ad in this group can be displayed per page view.

Ad Tag Requirement

For competitive and companion positioning restriction to work, you need to apply the restriction to the ads in our system first, then use one of the following options for the ad tag:

• Option 1 (recommended): Single-ad-call ad tag to display multiple ad placements with one request to the ad server. This method is recommended for the best performance. If you use this option, you do not need to set the spot number (option 2) when generating the ad tag.
• Option 2: JavaScript-only ad tag with different spot numbers. You can change the "Spot Number" setting when generating the ad tag. For example, top 728x90 is spot #1 and the sidebar 120x600 is spot #2

Full Companion vs Partial Companion

Full companion means all ads on a page must be of the same type: either all companion ads or all non-companion ads. This allows the reliable display of companion ads and avoids mixing, or skipping, complementary ads. Thus, you would need to verify the restrictions to have enough companion and non-companion ads to go together on a single page. Full companion is enabled by default. To disable full companion requirement and enable partial companion, please contact us for instructions.