Ad Server administration: hints and tips
Neat and clean ad server administration is the key to efficiency, productivity and optimal campaign performance for every trafficker. It impacts every aspect of your day to day work; from inventory management, to trafficking, ad delivery and reporting.
Structure the ad server contents as general as possible / as detailed as necessary
Do you really need to target down to the 5th navigation level pages? Probably not! You know what the sales team really sells. Speak to the sales manager. Forget the “nice to have” and “maybe one day we will...”factors. The more general you can structure your site contents in the ad server, the better. Lesser contents mean easier (re-)targeting, more stabile inventory forecasting and campaign delivery, not to mention the tagging job. And you don’t have to print the content delivery report on A2 poster paper anymore.
Create set groupings of commonly used content selections
Creating content categories/targets/rotations which are commonly sold as a package, e.g. women related contents, will make your job easier. Again, this impact targeting, inventory forecasting and reporting. Try not to modify them too often. Stability means accuracy.
Use keyword targeting for temporary smaller contents
Best example are news articles. Tag them as generic as possible. If you need to deliver a campaign to that particular page use keyword=pageID. If you tag the page content specific you will soon end up with thousands of areas/zones/placements that clutter up your ad server. And you won’t ever need then again.
Try not to auto-generate ad server contents and tags too much
Prepare for a battle with your webmaster as they won’t like it. But experience has shown again and again that the more dynamic the ad tags are injected into the page HTML by the by the CMS/JavaScript/etc, the more erroneous zones/areas/placements end up in the ad server contents. We’ve all seen it! The content structure becomes messier by the day. Try to find a safe yet flexible solution with the webmaster.
Do regular maintenance and clean up your contents
Whether its legacy data or changes to your contents. Regular clean ups, maintenance work and check ups are important to keep your ad server, inventory and campaigns perform at an optimum.