ZestADZ – Mobile Advertising Blog

Los Angeles, Chennai – Monday, 16^th November 2009 – ZestADZ (www.ZestADZ.com) a leading global mobile advertising network announces the launch of Android SDK (Software Developer Kit) Beta Program.

Unique features of the ZestADZ Android SDK include:

• Ability to request up to 5 ads at one time
• Extremely small memory footprint

Android SDK from ZestADZ is targeted at global mobile publishers who are building applications for the Google Android platform. The Android SDK currently supports Android 1.5 and very soon, the company will be releasing an Android 1.6 / 2.0 SDK.

ZestADZ will also be providing access to a full featured analytics solution (also in beta) to its Android App developers to help them analyze statistics.

“Android SDK represents an important step in the growth of the company. Innovation is going to be an important part of our strategy to stay ahead of the competition” says Asif Ali, President and CTO of the company.

The platform which is in Beta release is available immediately at www.zestadz.com/publishers/android with more information also available at the company’s blog http://zestadz.wordpress.com

About ZestADZ:

ZestADZ (www.zestadz.com) is a leading global mobile advertising network that allows advertisers to reach out to billions of mobile impressions globally and benefit from cost-effective consumer reach, and thus gain high returns on their global campaigns.

ZestADZ helps publishers to monetize their mobile traffic, provide higher fill rates and maximize revenue potential.

PR Contact

Shereen Begum

shereen@zestadz.com

+1 310 516 8552

ZestADZ Now supports Site and Ad ID Performance Tracking  for advertisers. This is possible by passing each of the actual Site ID and Ad ID for each click while redirecting to the advertiser provided URL. This feature is useful for advertisers who want to track traffic from specific publisher sites or apps. Advertisers can also use this mechanism to track their own ad-wise  / site-wise performance and request for blocking specific Sites / Apps or Mobile

How it works:

Advertisers can submit a landing page URL for each creative, for example

The Ad - Download unlimited games for $9.99 a month

Can have the URL – http://mycontentsite.com/specialoffer999

To enable tracking of the Ad / Site performance, ZestADZ will automatically append the following variables

cid - This is an unsigned integer which identifies a Site or App on ZestADZ.

adid - This is an unsigned integer which uniquely identifies an Ad on ZestADZ

Therefore the redirected URL will actually look like

http://mycontentsite.com/specialoffer999?cid=553241&adid=4323

The advertiser can extract the cid and adid variable and store and analyze how many clicks have come in from specific publishers or ads.

In the near future, ZestADZ will also be able to send in additional parameters such as the mobile handset and other important parameters.

So what can an advertiser do if a particular Site or Ad is not delivering the desired performance?

You can log on to your account and block your non performing ads.

To block non performing publisher sites or apps, email your account manager and mention the cid (Site or App ID) and we will block it for you in less than 24 hours.

Please send your feedback about this feature to support@zestadz.com

regards

ZestADZ Engineering Team

ZestADZ Analytics is an upcoming mobile analytics solution by ZestADZ targeted at both publishers and advertisers. ZestADZ Analytics enabling them to extract  deep insights enabling them to take better business decisions.

As we put forth in one of our recent blogs,  there are many instances where advertisers and publishers request for more data such as how many unique visitors saw the campaign, what kind of devices are accessing them and so forth. Based on these market requirements we have built an extensive mobile analytics solution that complements our ad network – ZestADZ. ZestADZ Analytics comes at no additional charge to both advertisers and publishers.

A Preview of information and features that ZestADZ Analytics provides -

For Advertisers

ZestADZ Analytics gives information such as

• Visitor tracking
• Popular Handsets
• Popular Handset Supported Properties
• Detailed Ad-wise Performance
• Geo statistics
• Carrier-wise break down of traffic

Using ZestADZ Analytics, advertisers will be able to make better decisions on their campaigns such as

• Tune landing pages to suit incoming traffic
• Optimize campaign and creatives to the amount of incoming visitors
• Optimize campaigns based on handsets / manufacturers and features  that are popular
• Understand what carriers are delivering better quality traffic

Advertisers cannot yet measure download tracking or ROI but these are key features we will be adding in near future.

For Publishers

ZestADZ Analytics gives information such as

• Visitor tracking
• Traffic delivered
• Popular Handset Manufacturers
• Popular Handset Supported Properties
• Geo statistics
• Region wise breakdown of traffic
• Carrier break down of traffic

Using Analytics, publishers will be able to

• Track web / mobile apps in a single interface
• Get important statistics  in a single console
• Optimize / select ads based on available handset / carrier / location data and reject non performing or non relevant ads

Presentations

Online presentations and screenshots are available at the advertiser link and publisher link respectively.

So how can you start using analytics?

ZestADZ Analytics is currently in private beta and if you would like to try it, please get in touch with us by writing an email to analytics [at] zestadz.com or by requesting an invite at http://analytics.zestadz.com

Existing advertisers and publishers – You will get an invite soon to start using mobile analytics.

Thank you and please send us your feedback.

ZestADZ Engineering Team

ZestADZ is proud to announce the launch of ZestADZ Android SDK Beta Program. Here are a few key reasons why you should publish your android apps with ZestADZ

- You’re joining a large network of mobile app publishers - ZestADZ already has a large network of mobile app publishes who publish mobile ads on J2ME / Symbian / iPhone.

- Mobile Analytics included to track your traffic on your android app - ZestADZ comes with a superb analytics solution that will be an important part of your publishing cycle.

- We will help you integrate with multiple networks - At ZestADZ – we realize that many times publishers do not want to be tied down to a single mobile ad network. That is the precise reason why we will help you integrate with other networks to fill your unfilled inventory.

- You’re in Control - At ZestADZ you’re in control with powerful mobile advertising tools – Ad approval screens, XML reports, Powerful reporting and analytics – all of this puts absolute control in your hands to control mobile advertising.

- House ads coming soon – We’re launching house ads that will help you cross promote android ads. Keep visiting our blog for more updates at http://zestadz.wordpress.com.

Please write to asha [at] zestadz.com be a part of this program and start publishing Android ads. We will revert back with the SDK and instructions to integrate it with your android app.

The Android SDK will be available for all publishers by third week of November, 2009.

We have made further upgrades to our site install code and this time there has been key functionality added to enhance user tracking. Though this functionality in the API is still in its early days and there are other ways in which we track users, this upgrade will essentially help deliver better ROI for publishers as advertisers are willing to pay for better metrics and results.

This is an important enhancement  but ZestADZ is completely backward compatible with the previous code. So you can choose to upgrade or choose to remain with your existing site install code.

We would however would strongly recommend you going in for an upgrade of the site install code.

If there are any questions, write to us at support [at] zestadz.com

We have been doing a number of user experience upgrades which we believe will will enhance your mobile advertising experience. A number of them have gone live.

#1 Dashboard

The post login home page has been replaced by a simple dashboard that provides a review of the current campaigns or ad clients. You can directly click on them to go to the reports section

#2 Publisher payments summaries

The top right publisher payments notification was confusing to a few of our publishers who thought their previous amounts vanished at the end of each month. That has been updated with the publisher payments – current and pending payments visible on the top right corner of the screen

#3 Ajax driven search in forms

Simple feature that helps users search in large data sets. This will be extremely useful for advertisers who are managing large number of campaigns.

#4 More usable forms

Most forms have been updated to make them simple and more usable

#5 Improved Approve Ads Screen

This screen has been updated to deliver the list of ads and allow for easy approval or rejection of ads.

We have upgraded our campaign screens to enable levels of targeting. Advertisers can now launch mobile  campaigns by additionally targeting

• Specific Device Targeting – Choose a single or multiple devices by device names from one or many manufacturers.
• Device Property and Device OS Level Targeting

With these enhancements it is now possible to reach a specific set of users  you can now execute the following use cases in your mobile advertising campaigns

• Target users of a specific OS such as Symbian.
• Target specific Java platforms
• Launch a campaign that focuses on specific handsets in Nokia [Say E71] and Video capabilities
• Mix all the above scenarios together with Carrier / Country based targeting

If you have any further questions – please contact us at support [at] zestadz.com

Engineering Team

This was on a publisher wish list for quite some time – the ability to get multiple ads from ZestADZ in a single request to speed up their page loading times. This feature has now gone live.

To get multiple ads, go to site install code and select multiple ads. Copy the code and follow the comments to paste different ads in different parts of your mobile site.  

Getting Multiple Ads as XML

You can directly use the ad request URL of ZestADZ and get ad responses as XML. This is useful for integrating with mobile apps or in some cases mobile sites. We previewed this feature earlier in the blog for a single XML Ad.

Now you can make a similar request and get more than 1 ads i.e. up to 5 ads in a single request as XML. Here is the sample Request URL

http://a.zestadz.com/multiple_ad?ua=NokiaN70/%205.0741.4.0.1%20Series60/2.8%20Profile/MIDP-2.0%20Configuration/CLDC-.1&ip=122.165.32.211&cid=14131C047A50414347574B574153415E8C&recs=5

Parameters

• recs – this could be a maxiumum of 5
• response_type – could be text or xml
• cid – your mobile site or app client id
• url – URL Encoded url from where the request has been made
• ua – URL Encoded User Agent string of the phone from where the request has been made
• ip – the client ip from where the request has been made

Sample Response

Please note:

The URL in response – must not be URL Encoded again.

We hope that this feature will be useful for you. If there are any questions or comments or issues relating to implementation, please contact us at support [at] zestadz.com

ZestADZ Engineering Team

Edited – the domain for xml reports has been changed to http://reports.zestadz.com

We would like to announce that we have XML reports for publishers. With this feature, publishers will be able to extract an XML Feed of their daily reports for each Site  / App within ZestADZ.

To Start using XML Reports, Logon to ZestADZ, go to the publisher reports section and choose XML Reports.

This will open a new window with a request that enables you to extract XML reports for your Sites or Apps, on a daily basis. The request has the following structure

http://reports.zestadz.com/publisher_reports/xml_reports?key=key_value&cid=cid_value&report_date=09-mar-2009

The XML reports request consists of 3 parameters

Key: It’s a unique value and should not be changed. If any changes are made, the request cannot be completed.

Client_id: This is the site id for Site & App. This Id can be changed to get XML reports for a different Site & App.

Date: The date can be changed to generate the XML reports for the required date.

For Eg, to get the XML feeds for January 20, 2009, the above mentioned URL has to be modified as follows. I.e. in the URL the date has to be modified (Date format – DD-MMM-YYYY). The resultant response will be as follows

<sites>
<site id=”A12345678901234567890″>
<site_name> Demo </site_name>
<type> WAP </type>
<report_date>09-Mar-2009</report_date>
<impressions>100000</impressions>
<clicks>1000</clicks>
<revenue>$50</revenue>
<ctr>1%</ctr>
<ecpm>$0.5</ecpm>
</site>
</sites>

A sample request looks like this..

http://www.zestadz.com/publisher_reports/xml_reports?key=14131C047A504140415A4A5D4657475CDDC8779A1726FCE54DDBB9C9EF0D0F4FB6EFE8&cid=14131C047A504140415A4A5D4657475E8B8A24&Date=20-01-2009

We believe that this feature will be immensely useful for our publishers. Please do review it and send us your feedback to feedback [at] zestadz.com

Email alerts is a nifty new feature that is available in the new release of ZestADZ. It enables the delivery of daily email alerts for both advertisers and publishers either reminding them of important events or sending them daily status reports.  Access Email Alerts at My Accounts -> Email Alerts.

The key alerts that are available are

Advertiser – Daily Budget Notification: This alert informs the advertiser if the daily budget has been exhausted so that the advertiser can increase the budget if required. This email is only sent when campaigns are running and the daily budget has been exhausted.

Advertiser – Daily Campaign Reports: The daily campaign reports for all the campaigns that you are currently running will be generated as a CSV attachment and sent to you as an email on a daily basis.This daily report contains the details of Impressions, Clicks, CTR and the total amount spent.

Publisher – Available ADs summary: This alert lists the ADs available to be published in your account. If your site was having an “Manual Approval” of ads, you might have to log on to ZestADZ to manually approve these ADs for publishing them on your site. This alert is sent once as an email on a daily basis.

Publisher – Daily Site / App Earnings Report: This alert sends a summary of all your earnings for your site or app everyday as a CSV attachment as an email on a daily basis. This daily reports summary contains the details of Impressions, Clicks, CTR, eCPM and earnings.

Balance Notification
Since this is an important alert, we decided to separate this out from the other email alerts. Access Balance notification at Campaigns->Balance Notification. The advertiser receive an email notification, if the balance amount falls below the minimum amount set.   With this alert, the advertiser will get ample time to replenish the funds before it is exhausted.

Send us your feedback to feedback [at] zestadz.com

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Blog By The Engineering Team
ZestADZ
www.zestadz.com