AdvertServe Q1/2015 Update

A/B Testing and Optimization

Savvy advertisers know that getting the right message in front of customers is key to success. To that end, you create multiple versions of banners with different calls to action. Then you wait and manually adjust to show the better performing one more often. Sometimes that then leads to creative burnout so often times multiple adjustments are needed. This tedious but important process can now be automated with A/B testing, so you can literally just set it and forget it! Learn more...

Improved Campaign Assignments

One thing that's always drove us nuts when looking at the campaign assignments for a zone to optimize their chain/priority is that it would include future campaigns that hadn't started yet. To solve that problem, we are now breaking those campaigns out into a separate Upcoming Campaigns list to complement the existing Active Campaigns and Inactive Campaigns list.

Revision/Blame Tracking

Nobody likes to get blamed for making an incorrect change to a campaign that they didn't make. Now, you can prove that it wasn't you! We're now tracking changes to user accounts, campaigns, media, groups, zones and more so you can view previous revisions of them and see who changed them. To see this in action, just edit an item and then click the View Change History link that appears in the shortcuts at the top right side of the page. Learn more...

Campaign Renewal Reminders

Do you ever send reminders to your advertisers asking them to renew their campaigns? Then, boy, do we have good news for you. Campaign renewal reminders can now be e-mailed to advertisers on a schedule with up to 5 attempts being made to encourage them to renew their campaigns. Reminders may be sent up to 14 days before or 90 days after a campaign expires and can be disabled at any time on a per campaign basis. You can also attach a file to the reminder e-mails, so you can include your rate card or media kit. Learn more...

Google Analytics Linking

We've implemented support for Google Analytics Linking. This allows you to define a custom Traffic Source and Medium in your advertisers account settings. As a result, your advertisers will be able to more easily identify referral traffic from their banners if they use Google Analytics as their primary means of tracking. Learn more...

Pass-Through Variables

We've added support for Pass-Through Variables to the Code Wizard, which enables you to pass publisher-side variables into creatives, redirects or third-party tags by using custom macros that share the same name.

Better E-mail Support

When sending e-mails, AdvertServe now tries to connect to POP3 and SMTP using the standard ports 110 and 25 but if that fails it will automatically try using ports 465, 587 or 995 with SSL/TLS which is a complicated way of saying that we finally support secure e-mail authentication.

Multiple Account Contacts

With all of our fancy e-mail features we thought it would be swell if we gave you the option to add up to 5 additional e-mail contacts to each of your advertiser and publisher accounts.

Modern HTML Output

Some folks have been wondering if we'd ever update the ad server to output modern HTML or if we'd leave it using HTML4 into eternity. Well, you can stop wondering. The ad server is now outputting modern HTML with CSS and gone are the deprecated HTML4 attributes of days past. May they rest in peace!