We’re making 2023 the year of EXADS with some powerful new features on our Q1 Roadmap.

Table of contents:

• Ad Server Administration Experience
  • Ad Format Configurations
  • Network APv2 IP restriction
  • New Types of Inventory for Programmatic RTB Supply
• Advertiser Experience
  • Smart Bidding
  • User Profiling
  • Bid Shading
  • Similarweb Site Rankings
  • Tracking URLs for VAST Campaigns

Ad Server Administration Experience

Ad Format Configurations

We want to give more power to our Ad Server Administrators and to allow them to enable or disable their own ad formats through the Admin Panel. This will give them full control over what ad formats are made available to their Publishers and Advertisers when building sites, zones, campaigns and programmatic integrations.

Network APv2 IP restriction

As an extra optional layer of security for our Ad Server Administrators, we are introducing the ability to lock down Admin access to a limited number of IP addresses. This will ensure that only Admin users on those specific IP addresses can securely access the platform. Publisher and Advertiser clients will not be impacted by these IP restrictions on the Administrator side.

New Types of Inventory for Programmatic RTB Supply

We’re adding more types of inventory to our RTB Banner and Video Supply. For RTB Banner Supply we’re adding the ability to receive traffic through Video Banner inventory. For RTB Video Supply we’re adding support for Remote VAST. 

Advertiser Experience

Smart Bidding

In Q4 2022 we released our Proof of Concept for Smart Bidding and began alpha testing with some campaigns. The results have been very promising and we are now ready to move onto the next phase and to perform some beta testing with some real clients and their advertisers. In addition we plan to make several options available to Advertisers when optimizing their Smart Bid campaigns. Specifically the ability to optimize campaign bids based on a Target CPA value or Target ROAS value.

User Profiling

As with Smart Bid campaigns we are also seeing some promising results from our Proof of Concept work on Anonymous User Profiling. We already have anonymous data relating to how users are browsing site pages, the content they’re viewing, the ads they’re engaging with and campaigns they’re converting with. We now want to build an anonymous user profile that will allow Advertisers to target their campaigns based on user interests, age, gender and much, much more. We plan to start alpha testing this in Q1 with some campaigns.

Bid Shading

The Second price auction model was always seen as an accurate valuation of publishers’ inventory and widely used by ad exchanges. To give an example, let’s say that Advertiser 1 would bid $10.00 and Advertiser 2 would bid $11. With the second price auction model, Advertiser 2 would win the auction, but they would pay only $10.01, to beat Advertiser 1. With programmatic advertising this can be a challenge as it is not always apparent what the second highest price is. We are working on algorithms to determine what the optimal bid is when it comes to programmatic advertising and with second price auctions in mind, ultimately saving Advertisers money and time when managing their campaigns.

Similarweb Site Rankings

With Alexa website rankings being deprecated by Amazon, we are now partnering with Similarweb to showcase site rankings across all Advertiser campaigns. This will replace the existing Alexa site rankings on step 5 of campaign setup.

Tracking URLs for VAST Campaigns

When setting up a VAST campaign Advertisers often want to track their campaigns through other platforms. We’re adding the ability for Advertisers to trigger tracking URLs at different points within their VAST campaign.