u/Chauhan_Yuvraj

Hey everyone,

I've recently started working with Google Ad Manager and trying to implement context-based ad targeting using key-value pairs. Running into a frustrating issue and would love some guidance.

My setup:

• Passing custom KVs from an NLP pipeline (intent, brand_safety, sentiment, tags, genre etc.)
• Multiple House line items serving different contextual ads (IPL, F1, Politics etc.)
• F1 and IPL line items have custom targeting (tags = F1, tags = IPL)
• Other line items restricted using tags is none of F1 on F1 pages

The problem: On F1 article pages, the slot sometimes goes completely blank — no ad serves at all. My F1 line item is Delivering, creative size matches the slot (970x250), and tags=F1 is confirmed present via googletag.pubads().getTargeting('tags'). Everything looks correct but I still get empty slots intermittently.

What I've already tried:

• Confirmed KVs are reaching GAM correctly via devtools
• Verified line item status is Delivering
• Checked creative size matches slot size
• Confirmed tags array contains F1

What I suspect: Price Priority line items don't serve 100% of impressions — GAM's pacing algorithm skips some impressions even when the line item is eligible. Since I restricted all other ads from F1 pages, when the F1 line item skips an impression there's no fallback — resulting in a blank slot.

My current thinking: Add a House line item with no targeting restrictions as a pure fallback to catch missed impressions. But wanted to confirm this is the right approach before implementing.

Has anyone dealt with this before? Is there a better way to guarantee contextual ads serve without risking blank slots?

Any advice appreciated. Thanks!

I have been working with good ad manager & i am confused with the use of dynamic key values . I find that for Adv Targeting i am using Predefined Key value , but i want to know what is the use of Dynamic Key value pair & where to implement it