Advertiser and vertical block rules
Managing the allowed advertisers and verticals for offers on your page
Network controls help you to set boundaries around the advertisers that are allowed to appear on your Rokt layout. You can use network controls to control which advertisers are eligible to show offers on a layout and which are excluded.
There are two ways to restrict the types of advertisers and offers that can appear on your Rokt layout:
- Industry verticals and sub-verticals: These are standard categories used to define the type of product or service being sold by an advertiser. Every advertiser on the Rokt platform is categorized according to their industry vertical and sub-vertical.
- Brand domains: These are ecommerce advertisers that are marketing to customers on Rokt partner sites, identified by their website URL.
Configuring the rules for what advertisers are allowed to show on a layout is a fine balance between maximizing the value of your layout and creating a competitive network, while also ensuring competitor offers do not show to customers on your site.
How it works
By allowing a vertical, you are saying that any offers belonging to a advertiser within that vertical are allowed to show on your associated layouts. The opposite is true when you select to block a vertical. Blocking a vertical excludes offers from advertisers in this vertical from appearing on the associated layouts.
If you are an ecommerce company that operates in the travel industry, you likely don't want competitor offers to show on your site. You can enforce this by blocking all advertisers in the Travel & Tourism vertical.
Alternatively, you can block just one or a few of the sub-verticals that are your direct competitors, such as Airlines or Hotel / Accommodation advertisers within the Travel vertical. In this case any travel advertiser that is not an airline or accommodation provider would still be allowed to show offers on your layout.
A full list of the advertiser verticals and sub-verticals can be found here.
Excluding a specific advertiser
Similarly, you can exclude specific advertisers from appearing on your layout when you think the behavior of that advertiser is inappropriate for your own brand or ineffective in promoting the sale of your products or services on the page where their offer will appear.
Adding a brand domain to your network control list and setting the status to blocked explicitly excludes offers from that advertiser from appearing, even if the vertical that the advertiser belongs to is allowed. Similarly, allowing a brand domain overrides a block rule for that advertiser's industry vertical.
A brand domain follows the format of the website URL that you want to explicitly allow or block. For example, examplebrand.com.
Consider deciding to block the travel vertical to prevent competitor offers from appearing on your site. If you have a strategic partnership with a specific travel advertiser, such as an airline, you could add the brand domain of the airline to your list of allowed advertisers. This would allow offers from the airline to show on your associated layouts, but continue to block all other travel advertisers operating in the Rokt network.
Controlling the allowed vertical and advertisers for a specific layout
Network controls lists are shareable configurations of allow/block rules that are associated to a layout. Rokt provides a default network control list with every account, containing standard allow/block rules for the industry verticals and sub-verticals that operate in our network.
New lists can be created with variations of these controls to suit the objective of the associated layouts. Every new layout inherits the default list, but can be associated to any offer control list within the account.