Our Latest Product Updates

Anyone who has ever worked on an application could tell you that there are pages that just kind of fall through the cracks. A small portion of users ever see them, or they don’t come up during the team’s usual workflow. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ as it were. Or, resources are limited, and they are focused on the core functionality pages where the majority of users will spend the majority of their time, which is completely valid. But when it comes to creating a good user experience, the difference between an app that feels sloppy and a great app is in the small details, ESPECIALLY the weird little in-between pages. 404 pages, forgotten password pages, help documentation.

We’ve also been guilty (perhaps, on the rare occasion) of letting small things slip through the cracks as much as the next SaaS.

The Advertiser & Publisher Portal New Account Pages

A large new customer pointed out that the new account creation pages left something to be desired. These pages don’t get in front of the eyeballs of the development team as often as some of our other pages, but once we took a look we had to agree.

There was no clear action for invited users to take, and predictably, it led to trouble.

With a little bit of attention, these pages now feature a clear call to action, an explanation of what is happening and why, and what to do next.

Thanks to our extremely agile team and our continuous integration system, the change was rolled out within an hour of the discussion with the customer. Needless to say, they were happy!

Site/Zone Targeting

Here’s another example: our Site/Zone targeting block in the Flight management page.

Previously, it took over 3 clicks to add a new site or zone to target in your flight. This was a real bummer for people who needed to add a whole bunch of them.

All the clicks!

Honestly, that little piece of functionality was a throwback to an earlier time, in a different page. It didn’t belong in a modal to begin with, but it slipped through the cracks. We were hearing from customers that it was making them click too much and that made them frustrated. So, we redesigned it.

The new Site/Zone block

Now a user can add multiple sites and/or zones to a flight with many fewer clicks.

We keep our eyes peeled for other areas like this in our app, so we can hunt them down and kill them. Got a pet peeve? Let us know! Odds are we’ll agree and we’ll get it fixed quickly.

Questions?

We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know

Tell us about BuiltAds.  How long have you been around?  We have been around for two years.  We just rebranded and are off to a great start.

How did it get started?  Pretty simple, really.  We were searching for an alternative to serving google adsense on our site and came up short.  So, we saw an opportunity to create an ad network specific to our vertical and started reaching out to a handful of sites and advertisers.

Where are you located?  Sausalito, CA

What’s your biggest challenge with online advertising?  At first, many of our advertisers were still heavy into print media.  So it was slower going at first as they made the transition to online advertising.

How do you find advertisers? Any tips or tricks?  I find that industry trade shows are a great place to pickup more advertisers.  You have the opportunity to meet advertisers and start the relationship in a non-threatening face to face interaction.  Besides that, dare I say, cold calls.

Most effective network or remnant inventory monetization?  We do not currently use a third party network for remnant inventory.  We are open to suggestions, though.

Why did you choose adOS? After google came OpenX.  Then, the slow ad code and faulty reports.  It was an easy decision to make the switch adOS.

When customers request features, we do our best to make them happen quickly. This particular feature we had heard about from existing customers in the past and then when we saw the following we knew we needed to get it done.

@JamesCrowley @averyj @developerfusion Thanks James! We’re working on it!

— Adzerk (@adzerk) May 1, 2012

Geo-location targeting (or, as it’s also sometimes known, Location-based targeting) has been available in adOS for some time. But we’ve had requests to allow specific locations to be excluded, as well as included. Most notably among the requests was this shout-out via Twitter, on May 1.

6 Days Later

Today is May 7, and thanks to some furious typing over the past few days, we’re happy to announce that the feature is ready to go. Here’s what it looks like:

Previously, you could add a location by Country, Region, or Metro code to specifically target. Now, you can use that same level of granularity to exclude as well. We’ll be waiting to hear how this helps our users improve their workflow!

Questions?

We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know

The Adzerk development team works like a powerful machine, chewing through new feature development like an industrial shredder chews through old couches. It’s awesome for us and awesome for our customers, but every once in awhile we need to take a step back and clean things up a bit before we continue. This is why, a couple of weeks ago, we decreed a moratorium on new development and had a full week of code hardening.

The Goal

We set the goal of fixing 30 designated bugs and issues over the course of the week, and of decreasing the overall number of lines of code by a full 10%. We planned to do this by refactoring things at all levels of the application, from the engines on up to the client-side of the UI.

Bugs that we fixed and enhancements that we worked on included:

1. Cleaning up the databases and backend code.

We deleted a lot of old code and organized things to be smarter and more efficient, all the way through adOS. Keeping the databases and other backend architecture pruned and organized helps us to maintain our legendary 100% uptime, and keep adOS fast.

2. Cleaning up and adding more thorough Messaging in the user interface.

Our goal is to make sure that you’ll always be notified of things that are happening and changing. During Code Hardening week, we fixed some bugs and added more robust messaging around Campaigns and Flights, as well as places like the Site Payout page.

3. Making Reporting Faster

Now it’s even faster to run reports and download CSV exports.

4. International Friendly

We have customers all over the world, so we’ve cleaned some things up and made it easier for our international customers to integrate with adOS, including with things like Billing information.

5. Prettier Modals and Lightboxes

We did some work on our jQuery UI widget library, including upgrading our jQuery library and plugins. The upshot is that the modals are much prettier and more flexible now.

Going forward, we hope to do this once a quarter, so that we can maintain the same pace of new development without sacrificing any stability and sanity in our codebase.

Questions?

We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know

In an effort to make adOS as fast and scalable as possible, we will be moving our reporting functionality to a new system. We’ll be performing the migration tonight and over the weekend. You may have noticed that reports have been anywhere from real-time to a couple hours behind on the old system – the new reporting system numbers will be accurate within 20 minutes of an ad request. Which means when you run a report the data you are getting is about 20 minutes old. We decided to go with consistency and scalability over real-time.

Expect some delays

Like many migrations, we expect that this one may have some bumps in the road, so we appreciate your patience as we work through them. There will be periods throughout the weekend where reports will show lower numbers than expected – these will be resolved by the end of the weekend. Rest assured all of your impressions and data are very safe.

Questions?

We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know

Many of our most recent features have been designed to help make the interactions with your Advertisers easier and more productive, such as Advertiser Contact Management, Advertiser Creative Management, and the Campaign Management page redesign.

CPA Tracking was developed so you have more options when it comes to selling your inventory, in addition to CPM, CPC and Flat Rate. When you sell a CPA campaign the advertiser is paying per action. This is beneficial to the advertiser because an action (like signing up for a newsletter) is much more valuable than someone viewing or even clicking on an ad.

How it works

An action is recorded by placing a pixel on the advertiser’s page that you have agreed will signify an action worth paying for. This is typically a thank you page for filling out a form or purchasing an item. We’ve added the ability to generate tracking code for any Flights with CPA rate settings, whether CPA View, CPA Click, or both types.

CPA Rate type is selected on the Flight page.

• Once you select any type of CPA option as your Rate setting, the ‘Get Tracking Code’ will show up as pictured above.
• Click that button, and you’ll get a popup with the code.
• You can copy and paste it from there and do what you will, or use the email button to send it along to your developer.

The CPA Tracking Code Popup

Learn more

Questions?

We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know

Up until now, adOS allowed for five flight targeting options:

• Geo-Targeting
• Site/Zone Targeting
• Keyword Targeting
• Referrer Targeting
• User Targeting

Even more specific targeting.

We have had several customers request the ability to target a campaign to a specific IP address, or a range of IPs. The IP Targeting feature allows users to do just that, including the ability to:

• Target to a single specific IP address
• A range of IP addresses
• Or, exclude a specific IP address or range of IP addresses.

IP Targeting Block on the Flights page.

To use IP Targeting, visit the Flights page and add ‘IP Targeting’ under the ‘Targeting’ Menu.

Questions?

We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know

More great news for publishers using adOS! We’ve just added PubMatic as a partner that brings best-in-class monetization capabilities to the adOS Marketplace.  PubMatic’s services are available today for every publisher using the adOS platform.

PubMatic recently announced PubLink, a set of open APIs and pre-packaged integrations. By being one of the first ad servers to partner with PubMatic and take advantage of PubLink we’re able to connect publishers to the programmatic media buyers working with PubMatic.

Here are some common questions and answers:

How large must a publisher be to use PubMatic?
Because of the unique integration with PubMatic, all publishers on the adOS platform are eligible to use PubMatic.

What if I already work with PubMatic? Do I have to go through the Marketplace to use PubMatic?
No,  if you have an existing PubMatic account there’s no reason to change your process. We’re adding PubMatic to the marketplace as an easy way to introduce new publishers to PubMatic and streamline the process.

Can I add PubMatic if I’m using other SSP’s?
No. We are not becoming a meta SSP platform – the goal of offering PubMatic in the Marketplace is to make PubMatic easily accessible to adOS publishers, not to layer PubMatic ontop of other SSP’s. As we add more SSP’s to the Marketplace we will only enable a single platform per account.

Is this an exclusive partnership with Pubmatic?
No, the choice is yours. At adOS we are passionately agnostic about your ad tech choices – we refuse to take sides and dictate that our publishers and networks should use one tool over another. We believe this sets us apart from every other ad server out there. We are building adOS to empower you as a publisher to choose the tools you would like to use – we will work with any and every ad tech company out there so that you can build the stack that makes the most sense for you. You can expect more apps to be announced soon!

What is required to get started?
You must have an adOS account and you must have at least 48 hours worth of traffic served through adOS so we have traffic data to get your site added to PubMatic. You can expect to get ads up and running within a couple days of installing the PubMatic from the Marketplace. More integration is in the works to streamline this process further and add more value to Adzerk customers so stay tuned over the next couple of months.

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About PubMatic:

PubMatic gives premium publishers a real-time media selling platform for managing revenue and brand strategy. PubMatic’s platform combines real-time bidding (RTB), the most comprehensive brand protection tools, extensive audience insights and hands-on support to serve the world’s leading publishers.

We’re happy to announce a new Weekly Webinar Series. This is for anyone that’s interesting in learning more about Adzerk and would like to see some of the features in a demo. We’ve blocked an hour of Ron’s time to walk everything through the basic features of Adzerk and answer any of your questions. I expect this will only last 30 minutes but Ron is happy to stick around for anyone that wants to chat more.

When: Thursdays at 1pm ET

So that we know how many attendees to expect we ask that you simply provide your name and email address and you can expect to get the webinar details emailed to you shortly .

Also, feel free to send over any questions or scenarios ahead of time and Ron will be sure to work those into his performance!

Two new page layouts

One of our ongoing goals is to make adOS as easy and pleasant to use as possible. To this end, we’re constantly updating layouts and moving things around to make them more friendly.

Two pages got layout updates this week- the Forecasting Reports page, and the Campaign Management page.

The New Forecasting Reports Page

We tested first

The first of the five reports pages to get a facelift was the Custom Reports page, which we redesigned several months ago. The reporting pages are some of the biggest workhorses of adOS, so it was very important to make sure that we got the design right. After running the new layout in beta for awhile, we made some tweaks based on customer feedback as well as our own observations, and came up with the current design.

Here’s what’s new

• More logical organization- We moved all the reporting options to a menu on the left to make it easier to see what you’ve added to the report,
• Faster and more dynamic- We’ve added features like the ability to add and remove criteria before you run the report, and cancel a report that might be taking too long to generate,
• Email- We also added the ability to automatically email the report once it’s done running so you don’t have to wait around.

Campaign Management Page

This one was a fairly small redesign, but we think it will make your workflow easier and the page easier to use.

The old campaign management page

Previously, the page had a left-aligned navigation, and the Campaign settings weren’t clearly distinct from the Flight settings. There was also no easy way to get from the campaign back to the advertiser, or to even know what advertiser was affiliated with the campaign. So there were a few problems.

The new Campaign Management page

Here’s what’s new

• Clarified separation of Campaign and Flight settings- Campaign Management settings have been moved to the ‘Settings’ tab.
• Horizontal tab navigation- The horizontal tab layout allows for more room in the tab sections and makes the navigation organization more distinct to look at.
• Advertiser link- The top of the page now has a link that tells you what Advertiser the Campaign is for, and also allows you to navigate back easily.

As always, please let us know what you think! Is it an improvement in your opinion?

Questions?

We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know