AdvertServe Q1/2018 Update

GDPR Compliance

Have you heard about the upcoming changes that the European Union is making to their General Data Protection Regulation? The new regulations, which go into effect on May 25, 2018 expand the definition of what is considered personal information and are more strict about how you can ask for user consent. Ensuring that your web site is GDPR compliant before the deadline is critical to avoid heavy fines, which could exceed €20 million under the new regulations. Fortunately, AdvertServe is here to help with our new AdvertServe Privacy Shield program. By simply placing the AdvertServe Privacy Shield on your web site you'll likely be able to achieve compliance with minimal effort.

For more information and guidance, please click here to read our introduction of the AdvertServe Privacy Shield program.

Screen Resolution Targeting

We have added a new option for targeting desktop campaigns based upon screen resolution, which can be helpful to avoid showing large-format creatives to users with smaller screen sizes.

HTML5/VPAID Improvements

Previously we only allowed for HTML5 and VPAID creatives to include a single .html file. This restriction has been removed and you may now use multiple .html files, which can be useful with complex creatives or mini-site advertisements that might load multiple pages with iframes. Please be aware, however, that our system must be able to identify which .html file is the main one and it should be named index.html or main.html

Search Improvements

You can now search inside of textual asset files for HTML5 and VPAID creatives! Previously the content of these files was not indexed. However, it can be quite useful to search within these files if you are looking for creatives that use a specific fragment of code that needs to be updated.

Crawler Improvements

Our contextual spider will now crawl pages on https domains when certificates are self-signed, expired or otherwise invalid (i.e. incorrect domain) which all seem to be common with development sites and lead to tons of crawling errors.

AJAX Effects

The AJAX banner zone code wizard now allows selecting the automatic refresh option in tandem with the crawler or shoutbox effects, which can be a great way to boost impressions with these viewability-optimized formats.

Third-Party Verification

Integrating with third-party verification systems such as IAS, MOAT or Forensiq requires a tag id for viewability measurement. This has been difficult to implement in the past since each media type has a different id naming convention. To simplify this we have added a new %%VEID%% macro, which expands to the id of the DOM element being measured for viewablility.

Do Not Track Macro

We have added a new %%DNT%% macro that can be employed with third-party tags to indicate if a user has enable Do Not Track in their browser or not.