Why should I host my files at Adform

In a fast-paced digital marketing world, agility is one of the key factors for campaign

success. Advertising material, whether it is a standard banner, rich media banner or

streaming video has to load quickly and smoothly to any user irrespective of location,

internet connection, etc.

Over many years of experience in ad serving and ad hosting, Adform developed a state-of-

art server network that allows marketers around the globe to be sure that user experience

remains unchanged whatever the circumstances.

Introduction

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How Adform serves streaming and heavy ads

When heavy or streaming ads are served via Adform

they are facilitated through three different backbone

networks depending on:

a number of parameters including the locations of

the users;

the type and weight of the file;

the response time of the networks to which banners

are served.

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The importance of technology

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It is vital for advertisers, agencies and publishers to understand the importance of the

technology involved to ensure the quality of video streaming and heavy file hosting. The

two main technological components, fail-over and global delivery networks, are explained

below.

Fail-over is the most important feature for fast and stable campaign performance.

It will check server performance on a minute-to-minute basis and switch traffic if any

unsatisfactory delays are detected.

Fail-over

Global content delivery

corrupted connection (not suitable)

Adform selects the best performing servers automatically

A global content delivery network

ensures that user experience is unaffected

by the user's location.

Common mistakes and their outcomes

A server is down due to updating or maintenance, software failures, or hardware and

power spike failures.

A single data centre is occasionally down due to temporary power failures, UPS failures

and cable breaches, often as a result of human error or temperature overload.

Basically all ISPs have downtime or delays due to denial of service attacks, customer

traffic surges and especially router issues including upgrades and failures.

Streaming from a server in the UK to a PC in Spain or through a proxy server in the US

can add significant delays and other causes of poor experience. Even when running ads

on, for example, a UK media, a significant portion of visits to that medium are through

foreign IPs and proxy servers.

Manual switching will introduce down-time of many minutes when any of the above

failures occur. Therefore it is absolutely critical to have automatic switching in all

cases.

In general, advertising campaigns and their content should never be served through

inexperienced and unprofessional providers, e.g. a creative agency that has rented a server.

These situations end up causing down-time affecting all the media involved.

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When using any of the above it is only a matter of time when one of the following will occur:

Adform has years of experience serving billions of ads worldwide. This experience

allows us to identify the most common ad serving and streaming file-hosting errors

made by advertisers, agencies and publishers alike.

Ads are hosted on a single server.

Ads are hosted at a single data centre.

Ads are hosted by a single ISP (internet service provider) providing internet access.

A single specific country is the origin of all servers/data centres/ISPs.

Manual switching between failed servers, data centres, ISPs or countries.

Common mistakes in heavy and streaming file serving

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Costs

Approximately 50% of the heavy material serving set-up costs are

fixed; therefore a simple formula can never be applied to calculate

streaming costs. In order to keep our pricing model fair, Adform

distributes fixed costs across all heavy file impressions.

Furthermore, you would be missing out on unique Adform features like:

Statistics and features

Report dimensions and metrics that are unavailable when banners are not served by Adform:

Banner visibility time

In-screen impressions

Banner heatmap

Banner mouse-overs

Affiliate network reporting

Rotator functions and banner

scheduling

Technical data (geographical, OS,

browser, etc.)

Tracking of events inside banners

Rich media metrics (video preview

time, expandable banner expands,

etc.)

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Creative material optimization

Retargeting

Banner content manager

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The Adform reporting module

provides marketers and

advertisers with a vast amount of

unique report metrics and

dimensions.

When banners are served on

servers other than Adform, it

results in reduced availability of

report metrics.

Five good reasons to host your files at Adform

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Solid and

reliable

performance

worldwide

Vast amount of

unique report

metrics

Fair and

transparent cost

calculation

Professional

support

No downtime

Adform is a leading supplier of products and services within digital

marketing. The company was founded in 2002 and offers a digital universal

solution consisting of campaign planning, ad serving, search engine

marketing, web analytics and reporting.

Adform has leading clients in all major industries and delivered campaigns

for over 2,700 clients across 4,900 global web publishers in more than 25

countries worldwide in 2010.

Adform has offices in London, Hamburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Milan, Wroclaw,

Czech Republic, Vilnius and Copenhagen

About Adform

+370 52 721111

C AL L U S :

sales@adform.com

C O N TA C T U S B Y EM A I L :

www.adform.com

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