HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Publisher-Passed Data
Ad servers are pretty powerful on their own, and when used in conjunction with DCO offerings and dynamic delivery
rules, they're
really
powerful. But what's interesting is that ad servers can even use publisher data to bring yet more
dynamics to the ad experience. Publisher-passed data can be used in serving dynamic ads by passing information
the publisher knows about their visitors into the ad server's ad tag. This information typically comes through the ad
tag by way of a string value, usually comma or pipe-delimited, but it can often be encrypted on the tag pass-through
from the publisher and then decrypted by the ad server. This encryption is done so no malicious behavior can be
performed with the user's data unknowingly. The publisher typically gathers this data by offering a free service for a
user/member to sign up for. This could be an e-mail account, free music streaming account, or even a social network.
The following example could represent many values on input to the ad tag, such as age, zip, gender, and interests:
var adInput = "29|19428|M|Business,Technology"
Or Base64 encoded:
var adInput = "Mjl8MTk0Mjh8TXxCdXNpbmVzcyxUZWNobm9sb2d5";
■
Note
As you can see, the
adInput
var could be the main input into the ad server's ad tag. The publisher would then
populate the data when the ad renders on its page. Publishers that take advantage of this type of data passing are
Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and many, many others because it allows for more relevant advertising methods among their
user bases. If you remember from the first chapter, I covered that most free services such as Yahoo and Google offer
their advertisers their vast user base in exchange for media dollars. In other words, the publisher offers a free service
for collecting the user's information. Hence, users are the product the publisher is selling, and advertisers are the
publisher's customers. However, it's not all supposed to be negative; it's been found that using some of these rich
integrations will improve your campaigns tenfold because it correlates the right messaging at the right time to the
right user and users can benefit from being served ads they actually care about.
Macros and Variables
Macros are the last ad-serving feature I'll cover. Macros in software traditionally are used as temporary stand-in values
that will get replaced at a later time. This may be familiar to you when you use variables where you have references to
other values in your JavaScript.
A quick example of this would be var
man = john
, where
man
is the variable and
john
is the value. Taking
this concept a step further, macros can be used for extensive server-side value replacement. For instance, say you
developed a creative where all your click-out URLs were dependent on the publisher page to which the ad was
served. If this were the case and you didn't have macros, the creative would need to be developed in many different
ways to satisfy each placement. However, with macros, you can use these stand-in macro values, and at ad-serve
time, depending on the publisher placement, the values would get switched to the correct value. The following code
