Advertising Guidelines

Overview

Our Digital Advertising Guidelines are developed to provide a comprehensive overview of advertising opportunities based on platforms and technology. This document intends to set out all general rules (DOs and DON’Ts of advertising with CarAdvice.com) and includes pointers to more specific documents and product specifications where applicable and intends to be consistent with the latest IAB Australia guidelines.

CarAdvice’s standard digital ad units include the units of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Universal Ad Package (UAP) as well as a wide range of additional formats. Please refer to our Standard Banner Ads and Standard Advertorial Ads pages for details.

Secure Ad Serving

To better improve data security and user privacy, CarAdvice website is HTTPS. Third party served creative and its components (images, stylesheets, JavaScript, tracking pixels etc.) must all be secure to ensure that the creative is compliant and displays correctly across the CarAdvice website. Please note that secure creative can still click through to a non-secure website. For more information, please reach out to your creative vendor support team.

Our Measurement Tools

DFP
CarAdvice.com uses Google Ad Manager (GAM) to measure ad impressions and click through rates for all advertising campaigns.

MOAT
CarAdvice uses MOAT to measure and monitor Invalid Traffic (IVT) and viewability based metrics. MOAT has been accredited by the Media Ratings Council (MRC) based on their Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines and have been accredited for General Invalid Traffic (GIVT).

General Rules

Advertising creative material:

Must not:
- destroy, disrespect or pretend to be content
- contain nudity, profanity, violence
- contain strobing effects and rapid image sequences
- contain uninitiated sound
- disable form fields, navigation or other site functionality
- contain or prompt download of executable / installation files
- set third, fourth etc. party cookies for pre- or re-targeting purposes is not permitted.
- Try to launch in a new browser window (pop up/pop under) or shake browser window
- Reference any competitor publications
Must:
- be of sufficient quality – i.e. meeting professional design standards, using suitable image resolutions etc.
- leave users to remain in full control of rich media units, i.e. able to terminate, shut down or minimise overlays, players etc.
- include a static or animated fallback creative format to be served to users with low-powered devices, without sufficient plugins or where JavaScript disabled.
Accepted
- Animation can loop twice (play through 3 times)

Furthermore:

CarAdvice reserves the right to remove or request the removal / revision of any creative that is deemed unsuitable.
CarAdvice may at its absolute discretion refuse to publish any advertisement.
CarAdvice reserves the right to reject / remove any rich media ad from the rotation that does not meet creative specifications, contravenes guidelines or adversely affects site performance other ad placements or user experience.

Rich Media Guide

Rich media creatives are interactive, highly engaging ad formats, usually combining a number of technologies, such as HTML5, video etc. Typical rich media executions are full page adverts, expanding ads, video rectangles and transitional. Rich media creative may include click-initiated sound, video and data-capture forms etc.

Rich Media Rules

Our overall goal is to ensure the best user experience. This will avoid negative impact on both our clients & CarAdvice brand(s).

All rich media creatives must be SafeFrame compatible
All rich media creative must be loaded “politely”, i.e. following the completion of the parent page’s load (See glossary for polite, subsequent polite and user-initiated download methods).
Auto initiated rich media ads are frequency capped, typically 1 impression | UB | day. See applicable Ad specs for further details.
Audio content must be click initiated.
All out of banner ads (expanding, floating etc.) are required to have a standard close button
Strobing effects and fast animations aren’t allowed.
Please note that CPU load limitations apply to all Rich Media creative. Our recommended peak CPU load is 20%. Creative above this load may be rejected by CarAdvice’s Ad Operations.

HTML5 Guide for 3rd party hosted

The combination of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, SVG etc. enables rich animation and features similar or identical to Flash technology, hence you may refer to the relevant ad product specifications for details regarding rules, expected behaviour and deliverables with respect to user experience, hardware load (CPU performance considerations, file sizes) etc.

No CarAdvice 1st party hosted HTML5 creatives allowed.
CarAdvice should not be responsible for troubleshooting specific issues with HTML5 creatives such as appearance, functionality, troubleshooting, debugging or reporting discrepancies.
All HTML5 code must adhere to ad guidelines and specifications for its respective ad unit.
To improve processing power and simplify logistics, code the ad with CPU utilization in mind and leverage the graphics processing unit (GPU) that exists in most devices whenever possible. Creative developers should maximize code efficiency as much as possible so that it never uses the CPU to its capacity. Also, using CSS styling and transitions for animations divert processing power to the GPU instead of using the CPU

HTML5 Specifications

Creative Unit Name	Asset	Max File Size	File Type	Max File size of External Shared Libraries
HTML5 Standard	Banner	80kb	HTML5, JPG, PNG, GIF	100kb
HTML5 Rich Desktop/Tablet	Initial Load	100kb	HTML5, JPG, PNG, GIF	100kb
File Formats	Back Up Image	40kb	JPG, PNG, GIF
	Polite Load / Expanded Panel	1MB	HTML
	User Initiated Load / Expansion	10MB	HTML
	Video	Auto – 2MB User – 10MB	HTML, JPG, PNG, GIF
HTML5 Rich Mobile	Initial Load	80kb	HTML, JPG, PNG, GIF	100kb
	Back Up Image	40kb	JPG, PNG, GIF
	Polite Load / Expanded Panel	200kb	HTML
	User Initiated Load / Expansion	2MB	HTML
	Video (optional)	2MB	MP4, OGG, WebM

HTML5 Ad Specifications Notes

A HTML5 Standard banner is defined as a basic banner with single click through with contained behaviour. Anything beyond this is considered Rich HTML5.
A backup image is required to display for unsupported environments, such as older versions of IE.

Approved HTML5 Ad host vendors

Google DoubleClick
Sizmek
Celtra
Exponential

Timelines & Delivery

Tier	Creative Type Name	Description	Set Up / Turn Around Time
1	Standard Creative	3rd party served, non rich media	5 days prior to launch
2	Rich media creatives	Footnote, Celtra, In-Read	10 days prior to launch
3	Custom Creatives	In house built creatives	10 days prior to launch

In addition to the above timelines, creatives for Baseline campaigns must be submitted by 1 month prior to the campaign going live.

Additional Guidelines

Please note the above creative and campaign setup/turn-around times, commencing from receipt of all required, correct creative materials. Failure to provide creative within these SLAs may result in delays in campaign commencement.

Cancellation Deadlines

Refer to our Terms and Conditions for our Cancellation Policies.

3rd Party Ad Serving Guidelines & Creative Acceptance Policies

All 3rd party redirects must be live when submitted, to enable thorough testing before creatives go live. All 3rd party ad serving charges are the responsibility of the advertiser or agency.
CarAdvice reserves the right to remove from rotation or request the removal/revision of any creative that is deemed unsuitable for the users of our sites. CarAdvice may at its absolute discretion refuse to publish any advertisement without giving any reason. In case of refusal, no charge to the advertiser shall be incurred.
CarAdvice reserves the right to remove any creative from rotation that does not meet our specifications, contravenes any of these guidelines or adversely affects the rendering of our site, other ad placements or user experience.
The setting of 3rd or 4th party cookies on CarAdvice sites for re-targeting or any other user tracking purposes is not permitted without prior approval from CarAdvice. Creatives featuring unauthorised connections to external servers for the purposes of user tracking will be removed from rotation. Creatives can be returned to rotation once unauthorised connections have been removed.

Glossary

POLITE DOWNLOAD
To preserve user experience on our digital properties, initial ad creative file load sizes are constrained across the board. However, to compensate for the trend towards more rich media, two additional categories for file size loading were added: subsequent polite load and subsequent user-initiated load.

SUBSEQUENT POLITE DOWNLOAD
The initial ad respond file size is restricted, typically to a standard banner's file size. This first phase of the ad usually comprises the first key-frame of the ad animation or similar placeholder asset. A larger secondary download occurs after the requesting parent page has loaded completely (i.e. the [document.body.onload] JavaScript event is fired). This secondary download file size is also limited, typically to 100 KB.

USER INITIATED DOWNLOAD
Includes all files that load as a result of the viewer further interacting with the rich media ad creative.