Related Links:
Competitive Ad Filters - What? Why?
-Limits
-How To
-Types of

Within pubCenter there are two types of filters:

· Filters (I’ll call these “normal filters” to help differentiate whether I’m referring to filters in general or this type).

· Global Filter

Let’s start with the global filter since it is easier to explain and understand. First off, you are allowed to only have one of them. The reason for that is its intended usage. When you create a global filter, it applies to all your ad units. Global filters will appear in red on the grid screen for filters and indicate “global” in the scope column.

With normal filters it’s a little more complicated. To make them active they need to be associated with a channel. When you attach a filter to a channel, any ad unit impression that is associated with that channel will have the filter applied. That’s a bit technical so I’ll try to break it down a little bit.

When you put an ad unit on your website and then view a page of your website with the ad unit on it, that particular view of the page is an impression for that ad unit.

That impression can be associated with a channel in three different ways:

1. URL Channel – If the ad unit impression happens on a site that matches against a URL Channel, then that URL Channel gets associated and all its filters will be applied to that ad unit impression.

2. Custom Channel statically – If the ad unit is associated with a custom channel via either the ad unit edit page, or the custom channel edit page, then every impression for that ad unit will be associated with that custom channel, effecting all the custom channel’s filters.

3. Custom Channel dynamically – pubCenter provides for passing channels at impression time via JavaScript. This is visible if you check the “Include all the appearance settings in the code” check box on step 3 of the Ad Unit edit page. You can then edit the “microsoft_adunit_channelids” variable to contain a comma-separated list of custom channel IDs. When you do this, then when that script is executed on your page, the list will be passed up to our servers during ad rendering. Those custom channels will them be associated with the ad unit impression, causing all their filters to be active for the impression. This “dynamic” channel feature is something that deserves its own blog post so I’ll save that for later.