Check the campaign from where it ran
An ad system that recognises the advertiser will happily show the advertiser the right thing. Verification means arriving as an ordinary visitor in the market you bought, on a network that reads like a household, and recording what was actually served.
This scenario needs no prior approval. Ad verification is named in our acceptable use policy as open by default.
Ad verification means recording what was actually served to the audience you bought, rather than what the ad system shows the advertiser. Those are different things, and the difference is the entire reason the job exists. An account that is signed in, or an address the platform has associated with the advertiser, is not an anonymous audience member and will not reliably be treated as one. Arriving from the market you bought, on a network that reads like a household, is what makes the recording mean anything. Three decisions do the work: match the country and network type the placement was bought against, keep one address per market so that two runs stay comparable, and record the whole redirect chain rather than only the page at the end of it. Then be precise about what the run proves. It establishes what was served to your request at that moment, not the share of spend that reached the market.
Three decisions, and the rest is recording
The hard part of verification is not fetching a page. It is making sure the thing you fetched is the thing a real person would have been served.
Buy the market, not the neighbourhood. Placements are bought against a country and a network type, so the check has to match those two. The catalogue names the provider behind every address, which is the axis that decides whether the request reads as a household or as a data centre.
Keep one address per campaign or per market. Verification is comparative: this week against last week, this placement against that one. If the vantage point moves between runs you cannot tell a campaign change from a network change.
Record the whole chain, not the last page. Redirects, interstitials and the creative itself are all part of what was served, and the interesting failures live in the middle of the chain rather than at the end of it.
Buy the market, not the neighbourhood. Placements are bought against a country and a network type, so the check has to match those two. The catalogue names the provider behind every address, which is the axis that decides whether the request reads as a household or as a data centre.
Keep one address per campaign or per market. Verification is comparative: this week against last week, this placement against that one. If the vantage point moves between runs you cannot tell a campaign change from a network change.
Record the whole chain, not the last page. Redirects, interstitials and the creative itself are all part of what was served, and the interesting failures live in the middle of the chain rather than at the end of it.
What a verification run can and cannot establish
| Can establish | Cannot establish | |
|---|---|---|
| Creative served | The exact asset and copy returned to your request | That every impression in the flight matched it |
| Geographic delivery | That this market was served at this moment | The share of spend that reached the market |
| Landing page behaviour | The redirect chain and the page as rendered | Whether a user completed anything |
| Placement context | The page the creative appeared on when you looked | Where it appeared for anyone else |
| Brand safety | Adjacency observed on the pages you sampled | Adjacency across inventory you did not sample |
| Compliance wording | Whether required notices were present in your render | Intent, or how a regulator would read it |
Other scenarios, and the product itself
Questions about ad verification
Why can I not just check the campaign from the office?
Two reasons, and both are structural. Your office network is in one market and the campaign probably is not, so you see the wrong geography. And the ad platform knows the advertiser: an account that is logged in, or an address that has been associated with the advertiser, is not an anonymous audience member and will not reliably be treated as one. Verification only means something when the request looks like the audience.
Do I need a residential address, or would a datacenter one do?
For the geography alone, a datacenter address in the right country will sometimes do. For anything where the placement itself is filtered by audience quality, it will not: hosting ranges are trivially identified and are frequently excluded from serving, so an empty slot tells you nothing about whether the campaign was running. A consumer-registered address removes that ambiguity. Datacenter
Should the address rotate between checks?
Generally no, for this job. Verification is a comparison over time, and a fixed vantage point is what makes two runs comparable. Rotation is useful when you need many independent samples of the same placement, which is a different question — and if you need both, run them as two separate exercises with two separate address strategies rather than blurring them.
Can I verify mobile placements this way?
Not properly. Inventory bought against mobile networks is served to mobile networks, and a broadband address is not one. That check needs a carrier address, which we do not sell today. Verifying a mobile flight from a fixed-line connection measures something the campaign never showed to anyone, and it is better to say so than to file the report. Mobile
How many addresses does a verification programme need?
One per market you are checking, at minimum, because a market is the unit of geography the product exposes. Beyond that it is a question of how much parallelism the schedule needs: each address carries 100 concurrent sessions, dropping to 10 past 50 GB in a month, and verification runs are small requests rather than heavy transfers. Terms of Service
Is this allowed under your acceptable use policy?
Yes, explicitly. Ad verification is one of the use cases named as requiring no prior review — you order and start. The list of targets that do need a verification step first is short and specific, and none of it describes checking your own campaigns. Acceptable Use Policy