To serve on premium inventory, below are best practices for your programmatic buys:

• INCLUDE Lists: The most stringent approach to curating supply is using an INCLUDE list. The benefit of an INCLUDE list is that you pick the specific domains, app bundles, app/site IDs, etc. that you want to deliver against, and you don't have to worry about random domains/apps popping up that are “low quality”.

• EXCLUDE Lists: You can use EXCLUDE lists to block unwanted inventory. The downside to EXCLUDE list is that new inventory may pop up so you will have to keep a close eye on your inventory reports.

• Ads.txt: For all WEB based inventory, we recommend targeting the following Ads.txt statuses:
  • Authorized-Direct (recommended)
  • Authorized-Reseller (recommended)
  • Ads.txt file not scanned (optional to increase scale, but a medium risk)
  • No Ads.txt File (optional to increase scale, but higher risk)
• Content Category/Rating: Blocking content categories can help remove unwanted inventory. We recommend that you EXCLUDE instead of INCLUDE categories as these categories are not always passed in the bid request by publishers. We also highly recommend that you do not block “unknown” as this includes any requests where a category is simply not present and will be a large percentage of available inventory.
• IAS: IAS provides pre-bid segments for anti-fraud, brand safety, and suspicious activity to avoid low-quality inventory.
• Private Marketplace: Targeting private marketplaces is the surest option to deliver on high-quality inventory. However, this approach generally requires more overhead if the deals are struck with individual publishers. We recommend working with top exchanges to procure high quality, multi-publisher deals. These deals can then be targeted directly on a line item or be included as Passthrough Deals.

Traffic Filtering

An additional benefit of implementing the above tactics as they can also be applied to your QPS filters to ensure you’re making the most of your contractual volume. The below are specific options for filtering:

• INCLUDE & EXCLUDE lists (domain, app bundle, app/site IDs)
• Ads.txt statuses for web inventory
• Content Categories/Ratings (Exclude only recommended)
• Private Marketplace (Deal IDs)