AdvertServe Q2/2015 Update

Campaign Competitors

Since the debut of AdvertServe it has been possible to set an advertisers campaigns to compete with each other. You simply checked the Self Compete option in the advertisers competitor settings and none of their campaigns would show on a page at the same time. Nice and easy, yes, but this failed to handle situations where you might not want all of an advertisers campaigns to compete with each other. The only way you were able to deal with such situations was to break the campaign out into a secondary advertiser account so you could make the two accounts compete with each other, but that was never an ideal workaround because it split the advertisers reports between two accounts. By introducing campaign-level competitors, you now have a much more effective way to deal with such situations when they arise. Learn more...

Per Page Campaign Limits

Last year we introduced Consolidated Banner Campaigns and since then our customers have created tons of them. However, placing all of an advertisers banners into a single campaign presented a new challenge. It was no longer possible to restrict the ad server to show only one of those banners on a page at the same time. Unfortunately that meant you needed to frequency cap your consolidated campaign to 1 view per minute or continue creating individual campaigns for each banner so you could use the self-compete option for those advertisers. We were not happy with either of those workarounds, so thanks to some great feedback from our amazing customers the solution we ended up with is per page limits for campaigns. Learn more...

Bulk Deletion

Cleaning house is never a fun task, but bulk deletion of campaigns, media and zones can certainly help make the process go faster. Learn more...

Development and Staging Sites

Do you have a development or staging version of your web site for testing? Odds are you put some serious traffic on these types of internal sites without realizing it. This is especially true if you are using automated testing tools that might be difficult or impossible for us to filter out automatically. Now, what you are able to do is filter out all traffic from your development and staging sites, which is more practical than filtering by IP address as we required in the past. Learn more...

Crawler, Lightbox and Overlay Enhancements

You can now replace the close button with your own image as well as include a custom header/footer above or below the banner. The latter is useful to include branding or a sponsor message. Also new is a code wizard option that allows you to make crawlers, lightboxes and overlays a bit more polite. If a visitor clicks the close button, they will disappear for the remainder of their current browsing session instead of potentially showing again on the next page view.

Expandable Banner Enhancements

Expandable banners can now be created with a width or height greater than 999 pixels.

New Contextual Tools

Users of the contextual targeting and reporting add-on now have access to a couple of new tools. Both of these tools may be access by clicking the Tools icon in the main toolbar. Then click on Contextual in the left navigation menu to access them.

1. Query Index: This tool allows you to enter a list of targeted and/or blocked keywords. What you will get back in return is a list of recently viewed pages that matched your query. This a great way to spot check that your criteria were not too broad or too restrictive.
2. Purge Index: Using this tool you can now purge pages from our index, which forces them to be refreshed immediately.

Geo-Targeting Search

When creating or editing campaigns, it is now possible to search within the country, DMA and time zone fields which makes it easier and faster to find the locations you are looking for.

Campaign Reminder Enhancements

You can now disable campaign reminders in an advertisers account settings, which is much easier than disabling them for each of their campaigns.