Features Ad Serving

Default and Secondary Zone

A zone can have another zone as default or secondary. In case no ad can be selected from the active primary zone, our ad server will try to fetch ads from the default/secondary zone.

Chain of Zones

You have the flexibility to create a chain of zones with several layers for a more advanced ad serving sequence. For example:

Zone A is the primary zone
Zone B is secondary to Zone A
Zone C is secondary to Zone B
The ad flow will be A then B then C

Setting a Secondary Zone

Click on a zone
Click on the "Edit" tab
Under the "Advanced Settings" section, you will find the drop down to set a secondary zone

View a Zone Chain Report

Click on a primary zone name. It could be the starting point of a zone chain or a zone in the middle of the chain
Click on tab "Reports", click on "Basics / Daily"
Click on tab "Secondary Zones"
Click on "Secondary Zone Impressions" or "Secondary Zone Clicks" to view the breakdown report

How do I show default/house ads after serving all premium inventory?

In a typical scenario, premium ad inventory brings in more revenue, and you hence would like to finish serving those ads first before showing other ads such as in-house ads or remnant ads. In order to do this, you would need to create two zones: Zone RemnantHouseAds is the secondary/default zone for zone PremiumAds.

Zone PremiumAds links to 3 premium ads (X,Y, and Z). If all ads in zone PremiumAds cannot be displayed because of their restrictions (i.e. ad expires, impression quotas reached, geotargeting failed, etc.), the system will automatically look for ads in the secondary zone RemnantHouseAds.

Exclusivity

If an advertiser wants to place ads exclusively, you can use 3-level zone chaining. The flow of ad selection based on the quality of inventory would be:

Premium/Exclusive Zone: contains only the premium ad(s)
Standard Zone: contains second-in-priority ads
Remnant Zone: contains low priority house ads

When you link an ad to an exclusive zone, it will be the only ad to display. When this premium/exclusive ad expires or reach its quota, our ad server will try to find an ad in the Standard zone next. These standard ads can have any regular targeting criteria. House ads will be only displayed when both Premium and Standard zone can not be displayed.

Considerations

All serving settings, including ad dimensions and all restrictions, are independently applied to ads in the secondary/default zone. For example: if no 468x60 ad in zone PremiumAds can be served and you do not have any 468x60 ad in zone RemnantHouseAds, an error message will be displayed.

Example - Fill remnant ad space with ads from ad networks

Your total ad inventory is 500,000 impressions per month but you only sell 300,000 impressions. You want the remaining 200,000 to be ads from ad networks (like Google AdSense). Here is how to set it up:

Create 2 zones: Zone A for premium ads, zone B for ad networks. Edit zone A and set zone B as its secondary zone.
Create a new ad, choose the type to be "Rich-Media/HTML" and paste in the Google AdSense tag.
Link this AdSense ad to the secondary zone. If there is no premium ad available, an ad from secondary zone will be selected.

Example - A chain of ad networks

To maximize your advertising revenue from multiple ad networks, you can setup a chain of ad networks: from more premium ad networks to generic/fill ad networks. Here is how to set it up:

Create multiple zones, one for each tier of ad networks. For example: Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3
Set the primary/secondary zone chain: Tier 1 => Tier 2 => Tier 3
Create the ad with their ad tag from the networks. You can apply any applicable settings and restrictions to maximize your earning potential. For example: restricted to US visitors and capped at 10 impressions per day
Link the ad(s) to their corresponding tier zone
Get the serving code for Tier 1 zone and paste it to your site

You can also set passback ad tags in your ad networks to form a flexible waterfall ad setup.

Example - Limit one premium ad per page or section

You have 3 premium ads and one default ad. Each premium ad should display on one specific page or section. Any page or section without a premium ad should display the default place holder ad. In this case, you should use a zone chain and URL targeting as described below:

Zone PremiumAds links to premium ads: A, B and C
Zone DefaultAds links to place holding ad: D
Zone DefaultAds is set as the secondary zone of PremiumAds
Ad A has a URL restriction to show to URL A
Ad B has a URL restriction to show to URL B
Ad C has a URL restriction to show to URL C
You generate the serving code for zone PremiumAds and place it on your website.

On URL A: ad B and C will be blocked but ad A is available and the secondary/default zone is ignored. Similarly for URL B and C. For other URLs, all 3 ads A, B and C fail their URL restriction and cannot be displayed. The secondary/default zone will be selected and the place holding ad D will be displayed instead.