Channel Variable Configuration

For publishers who are using ad units to break out sections of the site, we have a config variable that can be set in the header so that you can pass the correct ad units to each page. This will help keep the number of tags provided by Freestar to an acceptable amount. 

Freestar's onboarding team will discuss the structure of your ad configuration on your current site, and make a decision on whether or not to use the channel variable. 

An example of a case where the channel variable would be necessary is if you have several sections of your site that are often sold to direct advertisers. Let’s say you have a clothing website and you want to make sure that the advertisers trying to promote lipstick on your site, are in the women's section, or even down to the makeup section if it exists. A publisher would likely use two levels of ad units so that when trafficking the campaign they can target those areas. This is where the channel variable comes in. Your site should have a way to know what section/page it is on, so we allow you to pass that information to our tags so that we can render them properly. 

Below is the code you need to add to your header, and you’ll need to dynamically change the string when navigating through the site. 

freestar.config.channel = "your-channel-name"

The channel name is comprised of the string of ad units that a normal GAM setup requires. Each ad unit is separated by a forward slash, so if you are using two levels of ad units in GAM the ad unit path will look like the example below:

clothingsite/womans-section

In the Freestar backend, we will identify “womens-section” as the channel, so now if we put this all together you’ll have something that looks like this:

freestar.config.channel = "womans-section"

So for each section of your site, you will populate the channel variable with that section and our code will handle the ad call that way, allowing you to still sell sections of your site.