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Release notes: October 21, 2024

3 months ago by MaryLauran Hall

This release introduces marketplace advertiser support in Kevel's Self-serve, allowing customization of catalog access based on merchant or seller ID, alongside the addition of advertiser custom fields and bid modifiers in the Ad Server UI. Reports now support grouping by individual products for multi-product ads, and purchase event responses include more detailed information on unattributed transactions. Additionally, the Forecast UI now offers a daily breakdown of available inventory.

Self-serve

Self-serve UI & Advertiser API

Added

  • Marketplace advertiser support - Marketplaces using Kevel Self-serve can now customize their self-serve tool to specify that advertiser catalog access should be based on a merchant or seller ID, in addition to or instead of a brand ID. Merchant and Brand IDs can be set independently or together for any given advertiser, and control which products are available for an advertiser to promote.

Changed

  • Brand ID supports string data type - Brand IDs can now be specified as a string as well as a number.

Self-serve UI

Changed

  • Date range caching - Some of your advertisers like to look at the past 30 days of performance; other are interested in drilling into data from the past quarter. Regardless of the date range your advertisers are seeking data for in your Self-serve tool, the UI will now remember their choice and persist that selection across pages. A cleared cache will still use the past week as a default.

Ad Server

Management API

Added

  • Advertiser Custom Fields — it is now possible to store custom field values on Kevel Advertisers. This works in the same way as existing Flight and Campaign custom fields. The schema can be set via a request to Kevel Support. In a future release, these fields will be accessible via macros allowing the values to be included in Creatives and Ads.

Management UI

Added

  • Bid Modifiers in the Ad Server UI — ad ops users can now set bid modifiers in the Ad Server UI. Bid modifiers allow retailers and other publishers to sell sponsored listings and other placements with dynamic rates based on keywords, sites, and zones. Bid modifiers are expressed as multipliers or a fixed price relative to a Flight's base bid, so if an advertiser wants to increase their bid for a certain placement or search term, they can easily through adding bid modifiers to a Flight. Plus, you can drive efficiency by configuring multiple bids within a single Flight vs split across many Flights. This release introduces a new panel on the Flight editor screen that lets users manage single and grouped bid modifiers. (API support for this functionality was released in July.) Learn more on the Bid Modifiers knowledge base page.

  • Advertiser Custom Fields — in tandem with the API release described above, custom fields on Advertisers can also be configured through the Ad Server UI.

    Example Advertiser with "External System ID" string type custom field.

    Example Advertiser with "External System ID" string type custom field.

Reporting

Added

  • Reports group by Product, for ads with multiple products - Reports are now capable to grouping by individual products that were part of an ad unit composed of multiple products, a scenario that is common with retail media ad units like Sponsored Brands. The report will show an impression for each of the products displayed in a single ad view, so care needs to be taken when interpreting the total impressions when running reports grouped by product that cover these sorts of ad units. See more details in the guide for Meta data on impressions and clicks.

Attribution

Added

  • Purchase event responses include more details on unattributed transactions If a purchase event is unattributable, the 204 response now includes a kevel-debug header that contains a reason of either:
    • "product not found: {productId}" - If the productId was not found in the Catalog
    • "no attributable item was found for productId {productId}" - ProductId was found in the Catalog, but no matching touch points were found for the user key(s) for this product and/or its category + brand.

Forecast UI

Added