Release Notes: September 13, 2024

The release introduces support for CPM-type campaigns in Auction priority across all forecast interfaces, with the Forecast API now considering bid price alongside priority level. In the UI, goal lines for Impressions, Clicks, and Percentage goals are added, along with several UX improvements to the Availability widget, such as removing zero-value entries and enhancing tooltips. Ad Server reporting now allows customizable CSV column names, includes lifetime value (LTV) metrics, and adds bid modifier data. A new click-based conversion rate metric is also introduced. In Ad Serving, metadata parameters like productId, position, and component can now be added to events, enabling dynamic product attribution. Improvements were made to monthly goal balancing for better performance. Event logs now include purchase event metadata, and in the Catalog system, ads deactivated by users will remain inactive, even after product updates, ensuring deactivation persists.

Forecast

• Forecast now fully supports CPM-type campaigns in an Auction priority, across all on all forecast interfaces and types (available, deliverable, existing, UI and API)

Forecast API

Added

• Support for auction in the Available Forecast with newAds. The availability results now consider the bid price in addition to the priority level.

Forecast UI

Added

• Goal line
  When the flight has a goal type of Impressions, Clicks or Percentage, that value is displayed in the corresponding card of the widget, both on the table and on the bar chart.

  

Changed

• Various additional UX improvements to the Availability widget, namely:

  • Entries with a value of zero no longer appear on the bar chart. If all results are zero, the chart displays an empty state.

    

  • When hovering over the bar chart, a tooltip displays information about which value it represents and its value.

  • Hovering on the list of values causes all remaining list elements to be dimmed while also highlighting the respective bar. When the hover is on "Matched", it focuses on the list, and the whole bar remains highlighted as it represents the sum of the three values.

  • Tooltip displays data information when hovering on bar.

  • Focus list and bar element when hovering over list of values.

  • Bar colors changed.

  • Elements with value 0 no longer appear in bar. There is an empty state if all are 0.

Ad Server

Reporting

Added

• Customize column names in custom and scheduled CSV reports — users can now customize some, or all, of the column names in CSV reports during report creation or scheduling. This functionality allows you to rename existing columns to names your advertisers and other partners are more familiar with allowing you to share Kevel reports directly without the need for post-processing. The Reporting API for creating a new scheduled or queued report now accepts a field called CustomizedCsvColumnNames that contains a list of original to new field names mappings. See the Queued Report documentation for details.
• LTV metrics in reports — reports now include lifetime value (LTV) metrics derived from purchase event data. Reports contain 3 new columns: LTV Sales, LTV Orders, LTV ROAS (LTV Sales ÷ LTV Orders). Learn more about sending LTV values to Kevel in the Attribution knowledge base page. Purchase events with LTV values received after 2024-09-04T16:56:48Z will be aggregated to populate reports
• Bid Modifiers in reports — reports now include information about any bid modifiers applied. There are 4 new columns that you can request as part of the GroupBy parameter list for both Queued and Scheduled Reports, exclusively via the API in this release:
  • bidModifierType: Bid Modifier Type (Keyword, Site, Zone)
  • bidModifierValue: Bid Modifier Value (Keyword string, Site ID, Zone ID)
  • bidModifierMultiplier: Bid Modifier Multiplier
  • bidModifierPrice: Bid Modifier Price
    The value in these dimensions are the bid modifier values that were applied to the served impression, reflecting the bid modifier set at the Flight at that point in time.
    Note, only one of Multiplier or Price columns will have a value in each row depending on how the multiplier was represented in the Flight configuration.
    In cases of grouped Bid Modifiers (eg matching a keyword and a zone), the type and value columns will contain concatenations of the types and values—for example, keyword+zone [Bid Modifier Type column] and snacks+123 [Bid Modifier Value column].
    These new Bid Modifiers are available now as new dimensions in the Reporting API for impressions from 2024-09-05 onwards, requesting data prior to this date will return an error.
• Click-based conversion rate metric — in addition to the existing impression-based conversion rate (CVR) metric, reports now contain a click-based conversion metric too. The CVR column remains unchanged and there are 2 additional columns in reports: CVR (Impressions) and CVR (Clicks). CVR (Impressions) is the same as the existing CVR column and is calculated as: ((serverconversions / impressions) 100). CVR (Clicks) is calculated as: ((serverconversions / clicks) 100).

Ad Serving (Delivery)

Added

• Metadata accepted on Ad events — Kevel accepts 3 new parameters appended to event URLs: productId , position, and component. Passing product IDs on events makes it possible to attribute views and clicks to specific products (and their category and brand halo) without specifying those products during campaign creation. This is especially valuable for sponsored brands placements where the set of products is dynamic and varies across impressions and shoppers. These values are stored and made available via data shipping and will be available in reports in a future release. Learn more on the Metadata on impressions and clicks documentation page.

Changed

• Improved balancing for monthly goals to improve the performance. For example, if a Flight falls behind at the beginning of the month this update will better allow it to catch up to hit the monthly goal provided there is inventory available.

Event Logs

Added

• Purchase event data metadata is now included in conversion event logs. This is a passthrough of the parameters included in Purchase Events for use with Kevel's attribution system. See the Standard Logs documentation page for details on the new fields.

Catalog

Changed

• Pause product ads — previously, Kevel's Catalog system exclusively controlled the activeness of Product Listing Ads (PLAs). If a user inactivated a PLA (defined as an Ad linked to a product stored in Catalog) in the UI or API, it would get reactivated the next time the linked product changed in any way. With this release, Kevel keeps track of when it deactivates an Ad (eg a product went out of stock), and will only reactivate the Ad if it was the system that had deactivated it. This allows UI and API users to inactivate an Ad and have that action persist across Catalog updates.