Help Center For Publishers

Zone for Email Newsletter

This special zone type is designed to serve image ads inside a marketing email or newsletter. When creating or editing a zone, you can change its zone type to be either Standard or Email. You only need to place the serving code into the HTML email template once and you can switch ads directly from within AdSpeed adserver.

Considerations

Many email software and providers, for security and privacy reasons, do not support JavaScript, Iframe, or cookie. Therefore, email ad serving is a little different from ad serving on the web.

An email zone only supports image banner ads
Option 1: If you're using an email delivery system that can add a custom value into the email ad tag for each recipient then you can have multiple ads active in the same zone together. With this value pair, our ad server can perform cookie-less ad matching between an ad view and an ad click
Option 2: If you cannot add a custom value to the email ad tag for each recipient then an email zone should only have one active ad, or multiple active ads but with no overlap at any given time
Reason: the email ad tag can show different ad images and track impressions normally. However, the click will have a problem identify which ad was shown because many email software does not support or allow cookie
In certain cases, image proxy can cause a mismatch when there is a significant time gap between viewing and clicking on an email ad

Setup an email zone

Create a new zone
Set its type to be Email/Newsletter
Link at least one image ad to the zone
Get the zone's ad tag
Paste it into your HTML email template

Option 1: Unique Matching Pair

If your email marketing/delivery system supports macros (or "merge tags") that you can use inside your email campaign for customization. You can use these macros to add a matching value into the email ad tag in order to properly view and click for a zone with multiple ads.

Requirement: the pair value should have this format &pair=em@xxxxx, with xxxxx is a unique value that matches exactly for both the link HREF and the IMG tag. For privacy protection, do not include personally-identifiable information. Please note that it must start with em@ and then the unique matching value.

Ad tag in email template (with macro/merge tags):
<a href="http://adserver/ad.php?do=clk&zid=12345&wd=300&ht=250&pair=em@*|EMAIL_UID|**|DATE:mdyu|*" target="_blank">
<img src="http://adserver/ad.php?do=img&zid=12345&wd=300&ht=250&pair=em@*|EMAIL_UID|**|DATE:mdyu|*" alt="ad" width="300" height="250" border="0" />
</a>

Ad tag when sending to Mary:
<a href="https://adserver/ad.php?do=clk&zid=12345&wd=300&ht=250&pair=em@HashForMary11112014123" target="_blank">
<img src="https://adserver/ad.php?do=img&zid=12345&wd=300&ht=250&pair=em@HashForMary11112014123" alt="ad" width="300" height="250" border="0"  />
</a>

Ad tag when sending to Bob:
<a href="https://adserver/ad.php?do=clk&zid=12345&wd=300&ht=250&pair=em@HashForBob11112014125" target="_blank">
<img src="https://adserver/ad.php?do=img&zid=12345&wd=300&ht=250&pair=em@HashForBob11112014125" alt="ad" width="300" height="250" border="0"  />
</a>

Option 2: No Unique Matching Pair - Ad Switching

If you do not use an email marketing system that supports dynamic macros for each recipient/send then you can use ad switching. You can have multiple ads within an email zone but need to make sure that there is no overlap and only one single active ad at any given time. The zone's email ad tag should only have one ad to choose when it is viewed or clicked on.

To switch to another ad, you can deactivate/unlink this existing ad and activate/link another ad into this zone. Or you can setup different start/end date restrictions.

For example, you can apply restrictions to individual ads within the zone to efficiently manage the email ad campaign. For example: a start/end restriction for ad A to show from April 1-15 and ad B from April 16-30. Or a day-parting restriction for ad X to show on Mon-Wed and ad Y on Thu-Sun.

Keyword Targeting

You can use keyword targeting to select an ad from a zone based on certain input keywords. For example, a zone Airlines has 3 ads: Southwest, United and JetBlue. You want to display Southwest ad to certain newsletter subscribers while JetBlue to another set of recipients.

<a href="https://adserver/ad.php?do=clk&zid=12345&wd=300&ht=250&pair=em@SomeHash11112014456" target="_blank">
<img src="https://adserver/ad.php?do=img&zid=12345&wd=300&ht=250&pair=em@SomeHash11112014456&keywords=jetblue" alt="ad" width="300" height="250" border="0"  />
</a>

You can also use keyword targeting to display the same ad (static ad) over time even when using a zone ad tag. The idea is to set a unique keyword for each ad within the zone.