Feeling Frosty with SpringServe

PC Open Market, targeting updates, protected media, analytics users, improved management of new DC demand and connection requests, and additions to scheduled reports.

Core Improvements

New Open Market

If you are taking advantage of Programmatic Connect (PC) on SpringServe, you have been able to access both open market and deal demand through our integrated bidders. We have simplified and improved the format of open market demand within the platform. The new Open Market (OM) offers many benefits, including:

• Improved PC workflow: adding OM demand is quicker and more intuitive than before;
• Unified auction: PC bidders within the OM line item compete in a live auction, ensuring the best bids for your inventory;
• Improved reporting metrics: dig deeper with new reporting metrics (bid requests, bids, wins, etc.) when you use the Programmatic Connect Report template.

Each bidder has a single OM line item that can be enabled on your supply; you can see how your OM demand is performing via two paths:

• Select a bidder from the External Bidders tab of the DC page and view its OM activity across all associated supply
• See all OM activity aggregated by bidder on the Open Market tab of the Demand page

Enabling supply for OM demand can be done in multiple ways:

• On the Settings tab of a supply tag set PC – Open Market Demand to Enabled in Demand Tag Options
• On the Open Market tab of a bidder use the +Supply button
• On the Supply Tags tab of the main supply page use bulk actions to Update Open Market Demand

Note that in order to ensure validity of the inventory being bought by bidders through OM, post-imp verification tools must be enabled at a rate of at least 15%. These sampling rates can be adjusted on the Settings tab of a bidder. OM targeting can be set on the OM Targeting tab of the bidder; this includes app and domain lists, country, IP, user segment, budgeting, frequency capping, and KPI targeting.

Reporting metrics for Open Market are available when using the Programmatic Connect Report template or when selecting Bidder Account as a dimension. New metrics include the following:

• Numbers: Bid Requests, Bids, Wins, Imps
• Calculations: Bid %, Bid Fill %, Sell Through %, Win %, Win Fill %

Refer to our documentation for more details on Programmatic Connect and OM. The old method of open market demand tags will be deprecated at the end of January, so be sure to migrate to the new OM. Please reach out to your account manager if you have any questions.

Targeting

We have made multiple improvements to targeting in SpringServe. You can now set hours on flight dates, mitigating the need to manually activate or deactivate demand in your account. Note that times for flight dates are in UTC and the end hour is inclusive. In the example below, the campaign will run from 5am UTC 12/21/2018 through 6:59 pm UTC 12/31/2018.

You now have the option to set even or front-loaded pacing on supply partner and tag caps. Previously, all supply caps had ASAP pacing. Note that even and front-loaded pacing are not available for lifetime supply caps.

We have also added targeting based on COPPA on your demand objects. If the COPPA macro has been implemented on associated supply, you can block requests coming from COPPA eligible sites or apps by selecting Enabled from the Block COPPA Supply pillbox in the COPPA Targeting section of the Targeting tab. If the COPPA macro has not been implemented on your supply, it will not be blocked.

Feature Additions

Protected Media

We have integrated Protected Media as a fourth verification provider for your SpringServe activity. Protected Media is available for inventory from any environment, including CTV. In the reporting UI, select Protected Imps, Protected IVT Imps, and Protected IVT % to see your metrics from this provider.

Protected IVT Rate is also an option for KPI targeting, allowing you to prevent your demand from buying inventory that has historically exceeded your set threshold. Likewise, Foresniq IVT Rate is now included in your KPI metric options.

Analytics User

SpringServe now offers a third type of user for your team. The Analytics user has full access to reporting – including scheduled reports – and visibility of all objects in your SpringServe account, but they cannot edit them. This type of user would be good for a team member that needs to know what is happening in your account, but does not need any write access. In contrast to using an ad ops user, you run no risk of accidentally making unwanted changes to your traffic.

To make an analytics user, select Analytics from the Type dropdown.

UI/UX Improvements

Direct Connect & Demand Updates

New DC demand and Direct Connection requests are now easier to find. If there are any new DC demand tags or DC requests, when you log in to your SpringServe account, you will see the notifications bubble.

Click View to see your new demand or requests, or click dismiss to close the bubble. When viewing new DC demand, the Status column will have an orange certificate. If you want to dismiss this demand, click the orange certificate, which will change the status from new, but does not deactivate the tag. Alternatively once a new DC demand tag has been associated to supply, it will no longer show the orange certificate, but rather a teal check in the Status column. You can also see your new DC demand tags by using the filter; change the Active filter to New.

Additionally on the demand tag index, we have added clicks and CTR to the full view.

When viewing the Realtime Debugger for a demand tag, you can also now see VAST error codes in the Events container. Toggle to Errors to see a breakdown of the VAST error codes that are being returned for your demand. These can be viewed either as a sunburst graph or a table.

Account Activity Dashboard

We have added a time selector to the Account Activity dashboard. You can now select from a number of time ranges and the data will update in the tiles, tables, and graphs. Note that range compare is not available for Month to Date or Last 30 Days.

Reporting Improvements

Scheduled Reports

For your scheduled reports, you now have the option to include the report as a csv attachment for your convenience. Due to size restrictions of email providers, attachments cannot exceed 7Mb. The link is always included in the email case the attachment cannot be accessed.

External supply clients are also now permitted on scheduled reports. Reports sent to these email addresses will be client reports – your cost will be shown as revenue on their report. Supply client reports do not have access to demand dimensions or metrics. Use care when scheduling a report to an external supply client and ensure that you are sending the report for the correct partner.

Alerts

API Breaking Change: Budgets and Frequency Caps

In January, we will be releasing support for multiple budgets and frequency caps on a single object. For example, you may want a daily budget of 10K impressions and a lifetime budget of 100K impressions on a supply tag. This feature will help solve for complex budget or frequency cap use cases.

If you use the API to manage budgets and/or frequency caps, new fields will need to be utilized (existing budgets and frequency caps will be automatically migrated). Backwards compatibility will be maintained to an extent, but we will no longer accept values written to old budget and frequency cap fields starting on January 7th.

If you have any questions about how this change will affect your current API usage, please reach out to your account manager.

Wiki Migration

Update your bookmarks to our new wiki address at wiki.springserve.com. Here, you can find detailed documentation on SpringServe features and FAQ.

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Bug Fixes

Various bug fixes and performance improvement.