AdvertServe Q2/2017 Update

Weather Targeting

If you stop and think about it, weather influences many of the things we do. When we get dressed in the morning it's wise to check the weather. Maybe you really need to go grocery shopping later, but perhaps you'll watch Netflix instead if it's raining. It's not procrastination if we blame it on the lousy weather right? The fact is though, weather affects our mood and there are times when we might be more or less likely to be interested in certain products or services. That's where weather targeting comes in. It's all about getting the right message in front of users at the right time by capitalizing on that. (Learn More)

Per-Publisher Frequency Capping

Do you have multiple web sites or operate an ad network? You have always been able to set frequency caps on your campaigns. The limitation with that, however, has been that those frequency caps are applied globally across all of your web sites. Meaning if a visitor has already reached the cap on one site they won't see the ad again on one of your other sites. To address this limitation we've introduced the option to specify whether frequency caps should be scoped globally or per-publisher.

HTML5 / VPAID

Building on our already industry-leading support for HTML5 we're excited to kick things up another notch.

• VAST/VPAID Player: As the demand for video advertising increases many publishers are having trouble providing enough pre-roll inventory. Wouldn't it be really amazing if you could take a VAST/VPAID feed and run it as an HTML5 banner? Well, in fact, now you can with our new HTML5 player that's built right into our HTML5 JavaScript API. That same API can also be utilized with HTML5 VPAID creatives, which can be a lifesaver if you need to wrap a VAST pre-roll with third-party tracking or verification pixels that are often JavaScript-based.
• Video Pixels: If you are building HTML5 creatives with videos there is a good chance your advertisers will ask you to add third-party pixels to measure video starts, quartiles and completions which is now a piece of cake to implement with our HTML5 JavaScript API.

Mobile Friendly Interstitials

We've introduced new settings to disable showing crawlers, lightboxes, overlays and shoutboxes on mobile devices for the first page view if they exceed 100px in height. (Learn More)

Budget Advertising Model

Most direct sales are done on a contract basis, but what if there was another way? Consider, for example, that an advertiser might deposit $500 into their account, you set up a number of campaigns for them (each with varying CPM, CPC or CPA rates) and their campaigns will then run until their available credit is used up. This is exactly how the new budget model works. We think it's a great way to allow advertisers to do a trial run on your site without committing to a contracted buy. It could also be great for lower-budget advertisers to purchase impressions or clicks in smaller amounts or without a guarantee of a delivery within a set period of time. (Learn More)

Regulatory Compliance

Have you ever dealt with advertisers who cannot advertise or promote their products in certain countries or if pages contain certain keywords or phrases? This can be difficult to manage because you have to geo-target and keyword-target each of their campaigns to accommodate this. If you forget to do that not only will you have an upset advertiser but they might be faced with paying regulatory fines. Yikes! To mitigate this risk we've added new regulatory options for advertiser accounts where you can specify blocked countries and keywords. Those rules are then enforced across all of the advertisers campaigns automatically. (Learn More)

UI Improvements

• Media Listing: The new Show/Hide Creatives drop down allows you to preview all of your banners right in the media listing!
• Improved Search: We've extended the media search to dig even deeper into HTML5 asset file names and the content of those files.
• Exporting Lists: You can now export the campaign, media and zone listings to CSV or Excel files with just one click.

User Experience

Clicking on the semi-transparent background of lightbox ads will now trigger them to close, which is consistent with how most lightboxes work on many web sites and easier for mobile users than clicking the close button.

Other Improvements

• It's now possible for administrators, advertisers and publishers to specify that they want account summary reports sent to them on a certain day of the week and this can also now be done for campaign alerts that are sent periodically.
• You can now enter a referrer target such as http://*.domain.com/ and it will also match the root http://domain.com/ as well as any sub domains without needing to use two targeting rules.
• Wallpaper ads can now have a background color set on them, which can allow them to be more seamless when a visitors screen size exceeds the size of the largest wallpaper image.
• It's now possible to provide a list of preset sizes for the VAST/VPAID preview player in the control panel settings, which is helpful when testing responsiveness at various sizes.