• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 13, 2024

Google Ad Manager is making it possible to deliver programmatic ads in an email newsletter. 

The solution, now in beta, will serve “reservation and Programmatic Guaranteed (publisher-managed) ads in email newsletter inventory,” Google writes. 

This could be a major new revenue source for email newsletter publishers that have relied on direct-sold ads, at least those that send via Gmail. 

One factor that makes newsletters valuable to advertisers is that they are cookieless, wrote Practical Ecommerce in an article last Sunday. 

Google Ad Manager offers extensive technical instructions on how to facilitate programmatic buys. But the key element is the “clkk,” the unique string per email value that can only be used once. 

“When clkk is set up correctly, it generates a string that's unique per user, and per email send,” Google writes. “To verify this, you can send out test emails. You should be able to click on the ad, land on the correct destination url and clicks are then reported. 

It continues, “If the clkk has only one merge tag variable, then it's most likely wrong because you likely need more than one merge tag variable to form clkk.”

But Google warns, “You must not pass any information to Google that Google could use or recognize as personally identifiable information (PII). IP addresses cannot be used as clkk input.”

The same line item can be used for both newsletter and display ad units. 

Can the publisher show different creative sizes depending on the deive type/screen size?  Yes.