Roadblock

Roadblock activation at stack level

What is a roadblock?


A roadblock occurs when a single campaign occupies the majority of available ad space on a webpage, aiming to dominate user attention and minimize competition from other ads. This strategy is employed to enhance the visibility and impact of a specific message during a designated period.

Roadblock ad units are defined in the ad server. There are two types:

  • Master Primary ad unit that serves as a parent to other linked ad units.
  • Companion Secondary ad unit linked to the Master ad unit, designed to display additional advertisements alongside the primary content.

How to define a roadblock within Pubstack?


Roadblocks can be defined at stack level within Pubstack’s Ad Management. When editing a stack, you can define which ad units can be part of a roadblock by using the adequate toggle:

The ⭐ icon lets you define which roadblock ad unit will be the master one: all the other roadblock ad units will automatically be defined as companion.

You must select at least two roadblocks ad units to define a roadblock within a stack. You can select only one master ad units.

Keep roadblock set at adUnit level when migrating to roadblock_v2 (stack level)

 ⚠️ Defining roadblock ad units in Pubstack won’t have any impact on your Google Ad Manager setup. You still need to define them in GAM as you would usually do.

⚠️ Do not select a "dynamic adUnit" as roadblock otherwise your ad call might take a while.

Technical information


  • Defining roadblock ad units will lead to calling them in a Single Request Architecture (SRA).
  • The master ad unit will always be the first one to be called in the SRA.
  • The companions call order will automatically be defined by Pubstack accordingly to the ad units positions in the page - the ones of the top being called before the bottom ones.
  • Defining a roadblock will not have any impact on lazy loading.
  • Defining a roadblock will not have any impact on refresh.