Google DFP Ad-tags: possible to specify timestamp/date for preview/testing?

Question

TL;DR:

• Best way to preview future-scheduled ads (i.e. for a newsletter)?
• Possible to archive old ads associated with archived newsletters?

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I'm working on a newsletter publishing tool, which uses GPT (Google Publisher Tags) for ad unit placement. I was wondering if it's possible to preview the ads that are scheduled to run at some point in the future (ideally, not counting impressions in this context).

Similarly, I'd like to keep an archive of old newsletters, and still show the ads that were published at that time (the ads correspond with the contents of each newsletter). This particular case might be better handled through placement targeting within DFP, no?

Ideally, the ads could be displayed as of a particular date or timestamp; is that possible?

However, if that's not feasible, I'm not opposed to changing our inventory structure (and/or using placement rules), but would like to avoid setting up individual ad units per newsletter to accomplish this. Any ideas?

Additional details (for process-related context):

• Currently running 12 weeklys, but moving to dailys
• 7-10 ad units per newsletter

Answer 1

As far as I am aware the only way to preview creatives without generating impressions is to follow the instructions given here.

As for your archive, yes placement targeting is probably your best bet here. I made a jQuery plugin that allows me to target ads based on the URL. So you could do it that way as well... but you could just as easily use a keyword and the stock dfp scripts.

Also what is wrong with the built in date functions of DFP? You can have multiple line items within each ad unit starting at different dates... that sounds like it would solve most of your needs? If it is a case of needing the one line item to show within the same adunit on different pages starting at different times then it becomes a lot tricker but solvable with a little bit of extra js (let me know if you want to do this and I can give you some examples)... you are probably best to just duplicate the line item and change the running dates on it though... its a lot easier that way!