AdvertPro Version 2.5

We are pleased to announce that AdvertPro version 2.5 has been released! Read on to find out more about new features and improvements. To obtain the update: visit our download site if you plan to install it yourself or request an update installation if you prefer to have us install it for you. Remember, you'll need to have an up to date support contract to receive this update, so renew today!

Mobile Targeting
We have added all of the most popular mobile operating systems and web browsers to our software targeting and reporting so if you've been waiting to start advertising apps to Android and iOS visitors on your web sites the wait is now over!

Retargeting
Now you can retarget visitors who have previously viewed pages that have been tagged with segment pixels codes. For example, you might create segments for your advertisers home page, landing page, shopping cart and order confirmation pages. This creates a lot of exciting targeting possibilities, such as being able to target visitors that abandoned their shopping cart for a premium CPM.

Custom Targeting
When you have more than one custom field using exclusion you can now enter a special target value of {null_all} in any field to prevent campaigns from being shown when all fields combined have no value. You may also use {null} to only apply to individual fields. This can be useful when passing %%CUSTOM[1-10]%% values to third-party ad servers and you want to make sure their ads are only shown when you actually have custom field values to pass to them.

Keyword Targeting
Now you can block or target campaigns when no keywords have been passed to the ad server by entering the special keyword {null} as a blocked or targeted keyword value, which can be useful when passing %%KEYWORDS%% values to third-party ad servers and you want to make sure their ads are only shown when you actually have keywords to pass.

Frequency Capping
Previously the click and action frequency capping would still allow campaigns to be viewed by visitors after reaching the cap. The ad server would just not count repeat clicks or actions if they were capped like that. However, this is generally a waste of impressions, so we've decided to change it so that once the click or action cap is reached it won't show the visitor the campaign again until those caps have expired. Basically the click and action capping work just like view capping does now.

HTML5
The ad server now fully supports the new HTML5 doctype and tags.

Windows 8
We have added support for targeting and reporting of Windows 8 users.

Popup Blocking
When using the anti-popup blocker or the onclick method of opening popups/popunders we are now detecting clicks on the entire page instead of just links, which for some users has increased the number of delivered popups by as much as 60%

JSON
Not a big fan of XML? You will be happy to hear that our API can now output data in JSON format. To get JSON output instead of XML (which is still the default), simply add an &output=json parameter to your API requests. Our API documentation has also been updated with JSON examples.

CSV Parameters
All parameter inputs for API requests that were previously specified to support multiple values will now also accept a single CSV parameter value. For example, before you had to use &geography_country=us&geography_country=ca and so on. Now you can simply use &geography_country=us,ca,... to reduce the amount of code you need to write to include those values.

Campaign Querying
You can now query campaigns by a date range with the API. You can specify a starting date, ending date or both for a range. Campaigns with flights overlapping the specified date range will be returned.

Action Code
The action tracking pixel code output by the code wizard is now using an asynchronous JavaScript call to load the pixel, which means the pixel is longer visibly displayed in the page and it also should be able to resolve a greater percentage of referrers.

UTF-8 Support
All of the codes generated by the code wizard now use the JavaScript encodeURIComponent() function to force UTF-8 hex notation (i.e. EN DASH becomes %E2%80%93 instead of %u2013), which provides better UTF-8 support for custom fields, keywords and also capturing of I18N page URLs with document.location.

MySQL Slave
It is now possible to increase salability and reliability by configuring a replicated MySQL slave database server. In fact you can configure a pool of slaves and they will be load-balanced automatically! Due to slaves being read-only their use is limited to loading user session data and generating statistics reports.

With the upcoming clustering support it will be very important to have a few slaves for loading user session data if you use frequency capping or post view tracking. Customers with huge statistics databases know that generating reports can sometimes delay the real-time statistics batch updates, which increases the risk of data loss in the event of a power failure or system crash. By offloading report generation to the slave(s) this risk is completely eliminated because it removes all of the potential for read/write contention from the master.

JDK 7 & Tomcat 7
Deployment with JDK 7 (1.7.0) and Tomcat 7 (7.0.x) is now officially supported.

MySQL 5.5
Deployment with MySQL 5.5 and MySQL Connector/J 5.1 is now officially supported.

Multiple Chains
Performance has been improved with zones containing many levels of chains. The ad server now walks down the campaign list in descending order by chain. This allows it to skip scanning campaigns in lower chains once campaigns in higher chains have already been found!

Drill Down Links
With so many reports a better and faster method of navigating them was needed, so we added drill down links that make navigating the reports a real pleasure! Looking at a general summary report and want to see a report for just one of the advertisers in that report? No problem! Just click on the advertisers name in the report and their report comes up instantly.

Share of Voice
Ever wondered what percentage of impressions each of your advertisers or campaigns is actually receiving? We have added a new share field to the reports, which stands for share of voice. This new field shows exactly the percentage of impressions each advertiser received and is available for most other reports as well.

Row Highlighting
When comparing different rows in the reports it can be quite easy to lose your place. Now you can click on a row to highlight it, making it easy to come back to. Any number of rows can be highlighted and clicking on them again will unhighlight them.

Date Selection
When creating a campaign the stop date picker is now advanced to the start date of the campaign making it easier to pick a stop date in the future from the start date.

File Renaming
When you try to upload a file with the same name as a file that already exists in the current folder, the new file will now be renamed by appending _1, _2, _3, etc... to its name instead of making the upload fail!

Locating Files
When modifying the file for a media or size the popup file browser window now lets you find the currently selected file much more easily. If the list of files in the folder is very long the window will scroll down to the file. You will also notice that the file has a different icon and is shown in bold to indicate it is the selected file. The last uploaded file can also be selected from the top of the file browser window immediately after uploading it as well.

Please don't hesitate to contact support if you have questions about any of the new features and improvements.