AdvertServe Q1/2014 Update

Consolidated Banner Campaigns

Campaigns are now able to contain multiple banner sizes, which simplifies distributing a fixed number of impressions or clicks between them. For example, you can now create a single campaign that has 728x90, 336x280 and 160x600 banners. Then you can say that you want the campaign to deliver 200,000 impressions. Those impressions will then be distributed between the banner sizes on a best-effort basis with respect to inventory availability. This not only saves you time, but can also help prevent campaigns from coming up short if inventory is too tight for any of the given sizes by allowing the other sizes to automatically pick up the slack.

Collaborative Fraud Detection and Prevention

We've implemented a collaborative blacklist in an effort to put a stop to impression, click and action fraud.

The blacklist contains IP addresses and User-Agents for open proxy servers, server hosting companies, cloud servers, virtual servers, compromised networks and more. This data comes from many sources. However, it's also going to be growing over time through the collaborative efforts of all of our customers.

1. When AdvertServe detects suspicious click activity, it will inform you to review the click logs and allow you to approve or delete them.
2. If you choose to delete fraudulent clicks the data is sent back to us so we can improve our blacklist.
3. Those improvements are then immediately shared with all of our customers, so everyone benefits except the bad guys.

One thing we do want to mention is false positives. If we're detecting too many clicks as suspicious, please do reach out to support. While our default detection rules should work well for most users, every site is different. We may simply need to make some adjustments for you.

Banner Size Reports

We've expanded our reports for banner sizes. You're now able to generate a banner size report for advertisers, campaigns, groups, publishers and zones. These additional levels of detail should be quite informative, especially if you have campaigns or zones that contain multiple sizes!

S2S Action Tracking Pixels

The URL Action Code Wizard has been more appropriately renamed to the S2S Action Code Wizard, which makes its intended usage much more clear. You'll notice we're now outputting a [uuid] placeholder where the third-party ad server should insert the UUID they received by passing our %%UUID%% macro through their serving tags. We're also resolving the visitors IP address, language and User-Agent on the server-side now, so it's no longer necessary for the third-party ad server to pass those values with HTTP headers as has been required in the past.