Using adOS to Deliver In-App Messages
We all know that adOS is great at serving ads speedily and with great accuracy. But did you ever think of using it for other things? Any type of targeted content that you might want to show to some users and not others can be served as an ‘ad’. Some examples might include: polls or surveys, requests for feedback, A/B testing, or content tailored to a specific location.
Adzerk’s use cases
We’ve used our own ad server to display targeted messaging in our app for two particular situations.
Requesting feedback
As you may know, we place a big emphasis on customer-centric design. This requires us to gather a lot of feedback and ask a lot of questions. We’ve leveraged our targeting ability to display requests to take a survey, requests for usability test volunteers, and requests for feature beta testers. Our responses have always been great. This is partially because our customers are awesome (it goes without saying), but it’s also because we’re able to target our audience very directly.
A message in the adOS header.
News and Alerts
Every now and again we might have something that we need to communicate quickly- service outages, or planned upgrades, for example. Using our in-app messaging, we can get the message out quickly, and can automate things like what time to show the messages.
How to do it
The principles of serving content this way are the same as serving ads.
- Place adOS tags inside the application’s markup.
- We added some standardized styling to the application CSS, but you could just as easily include the styling within the content block itself.
- Create a Campaign called ‘In App Messaging’, with Flights for different things like news, alerts, and surveys.
- Upload the text for each content type as a Creative in each Flight.
For testing purposes we usually use keyword targeting to target the ‘ads’ to one of our internal accounts, to make sure everything looks good, and then we turn it on for everyone!
We like using adOs in this way because it’s fast and convenient. When we need to publish an alert, one of us simply has to go enable the alerts Flight. It’s also convenient because we don’t have the hassle of running a separate CMS, and the product or support team can push alerts independently from engineering.
If you’ve experimented with using adOS in unusual ways and would like to share, we’d like to hear about it. Did it work well for you?
Questions?
We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know
Posted by
Sarah
Kahn
