Release Notes: November 17, 2020

To minimize the likelihood of changes that interfere with revenue operations around major shopping days, Adzerk will not deploy any new changes from close of business EST on Thursday, November 19 through the morning of Tuesday, December 1.

Coming soon: time zones for everybody!

Converting all times and dates to GMT can be a headache. Adzerk has been beta testing the ability to set time zones at the flight level and to pull reports in a specific time zone, as well as introducing controls for default time zone at the network and user levels.

Time zones will be turned on for all customers on Tuesday, December 8!

Learn more here: Time zones in Adzerk

Beta feature: Creative Library

Want to add an existing creative to a flight instead of making a new one from scratch? Can do. The Creative Library is a UI feature that allows you to view a list of all creatives for the flight’s advertiser, and add one of those to the flight. Learn more in our documentation here.

Creative Library is in beta testing. If you’re interested in joining the beta, please contact [email protected]!

Finer controls for second price auctions

Second price auctions allow advertisers to state a maximum bid, and then pay $0.01 more than the next highest bid for a winning placement. Previously, ads would skip other ads from the same advertiser and second price against ads from the next highest advertiser.

But there are some scenarios in which it's helpful for an ad to compete against other ads from the same advertiser, or even the same campaign or flight. For example, an advertiser may promote different product lines or brands with independent budgets. Allowing an advertiser's ads to second price against one another ensures that your site captures as much value as possible for those placements, even when multiple winners belong to the same advertiser.

You can now control how your auction is second priced. Here’s how:

In the UI, use the "Ads in this priority are bidding against..." dropdown in the priority settings to select the competitive pool for ads in that priority.
In the API, you can set the optional SecondPriceGroupBy parameter on a priority when creating or updating a priority.
By default, priorities configured with second pricing will continue to use the legacy behavior of not allowing second price competition within the same advertiser.

Learn more about second price auctions here.

Phasing out UI 1.0

If you are using UI 1.0, please keep familiarizing yourself with UI 2.0 in preparation for our final migration. Remember, our support team is available to help!

If you use Adzerk’s 1.0 UI, you’ll notice a new notification at the top to inform you that this UI will be retired on March 31, 2021.
Adding a new user via UI 1.0 will be disabled soon. Please use UI 2.0 to add new users.

Faster, more reliable management API endpoints

The following LIST endpoints have been rebuilt to reduce error rates and improve speed:

Multi-Winner in Android SDK

The newly-shipped Android SDK version 2.0 adds support for Multi-Winner Placements as well as some minor bug fixes.

Bug fixes, usability improvements, etc

Viewing all campaigns for an advertiser in the UI would sometimes show a list of ALL campaigns, regardless of advertiser. Kinda cancels out the effect of a filter, huh? This is resolved, so now you can actually see the list of campaigns for the advertiser you're looking for.
Saving a Click URL in the UI that included a question mark without a preceding slash (such as https://www.adzerk.com?source=example) caused an error. This is now fixed, so you can save ? URLs to your heart's content.
When duplicating a flight with a non-GMT time zone, the selected time zone will carry over to the new flight.
You can now geotarget a Metro/DMA code without also selecting a region. This ensures that a flight targeted to a DMA that crosses regional lines – such as an inter-state metro area in the US – will serve as expected without specifying every region the DMA touches.
Previously, when concurrent API calls were made to batch upload geodistance targeting geometries and create a geodistance targeting geometry, one would erroneously fail. This is now resolved, and these calls can successfully be made simultaneously.
Previously, creatives and ads made via API using a creative template with a hidden field would not carry that parameter and its default value, unless directly specified. Now, when you create or update a creative that uses a creative template via API, any hidden fields you don't specify will assume the default value for that field. (This matches existing behavior for this scenario in the UI.) If you do specify a value for that hidden field, then the field will assume the value you specified. Learn more here.
Various bug fixes & small usability improvements to support migration from UI 1.0 to 2.0.
Enabled editing flights containing at least one ad with invalid custom targeting.
It’s no longer possible to change an existing user’s email address.