Ads and Creatives

Guidelines

Creative and Ad Building: CPMatic is not an ad builder, however XA.net may refer you to a specialist provider that can help you refine your ads. Please email support if interested.

Third Party Ad Tags: Third party tags are accepted if they come from a well-recognized adserving provider like Atlas, Doubleclick, Adtech, Mediaplex, Falk or similar and comply with our Terms of Service.  If you are unsure whether your tags will be accepted please contact support.

Ad Specifications: We allow a wide variety of ad campaigns to run on our system, although certain types of campaigns are not allowed and may be subject to certain restrictions or require pre-approval. Contact us for more details if your ad campaigns fall into any of the following categories:

• Adult or suggestive
• Advertising specifically targeting children
• Alcohol
• Gambling or lotteries
• Political
• Pharmaceuticals
• Religious
• Tobacco

In addition, some of our advertising partners have their own restrictions which may lead to ads being restricted. CPMatic reserves the right to not accept any advertising uploaded to its platform for any reason.

*Note that any use of the word "free" or similar language are subject to restrictions, and we encourage advertisers to include full disclosure language on their websites so as not to attempt to deceive consumers.

CPMatic recommends advertisers adhere to the following regarding their ads. It is your responsibility to ensure that:

• All advertising complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws or regulations.
• An advertisement does not violate the intellectual property rights of third parties.
• Offers included in any advertising message include all material terms that an ordinary person would require in making an informed decision about whether to purchase the product or service being offered.
• Users are not being misled or deceived into downloading software.
• Advertising that includes warranties, guarantees, or other types of assurances to the user complies with all applicable laws, regulations or guidelines regarding such assurances, including but not limited to those set forth by the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC").
• Users are not deceived into providing personal information without the user's knowledge, under false pretenses, or to companies who resell, trade, barter or otherwise misuse that personal information.

In addition, regarding the information in the advertisement:

• Ads must have a distinct border to clearly identify where the page ends, and advertisement begins.
• Animation cannot exceed 15 seconds. Animation can begin again on mouse over, but must stop immediately on mouse off.
• The sponsor of the advertising message must be clearly identified in the ad unit.
• The advertiser's landing page must match the offer being made in the advertisement.
• It is the advertiser's responsibility to ensure that all product claims, warranties, guarantees or other assurances comply with applicable laws & regulations.
• The ad unit and landing page must have detailed disclosures as appropriate; in particular, full terms and conditions of the offer must be easily accessible on landing page.

CPMatic Ad Specification Guidelines:

• The CPMatic system accepts (1) valid image files including JPG, GIF, and PNGs, (2) Flash SWF files and (3) major supported advertising tags as long as they have a place for a clicktracking URL to be placed. The clicktracking URL should be indicated in the ad tag, for example [clicktracker].
• In the case of SWF files, please ensure that they are encoded with a clickTag variable for the click to be inserted into.
• NOTE: Any advertising file that is uploaded should not exceed 40kb in size.

If you have any questions about the specifications, please contact us.

Uploading Creatives and Ads

Watch the video below to learn how ads are uploaded to CPMatic (Video).  This video covers:

• single upload of image (PNG, JPG, GIF) files
• single upload of SWF files
• single upload of ad tags (HTML files) with clicktracking and cache busting macros
• bulk upload using spreadsheet functionality

 

Reporting Tools

Reporting, Analysis, and Campaign Optimization

Continued optimization of your campaign between different external sources (publishers, networks, exchanges) and websites, behavioral groups and segments within those sources is provided by CPMatic and its operations staff. Our expertise lies in how we set up and automate the testing of different media, publishers, creatives and placements. Under CPMatic your campaign performance can improve and start approaching your goals as our system learns and hones in on the best sites and places where your campaign and individual ads are performing.

 

*Note: If the system determines it  is unable to reach your CPA goals, it may slow down the pace of the campaign's spending. This highlights the need to set realistic CPA goals in the interface – if you say your target is $10 but you'd be happy with a $15 CPA, the system may slow down if it's only able to deliver a $13 or $14 CPA amount – and you'll miss out on volume you would otherwise want. 

Billing and Payments

Billing and Starting a Campaign

CPMatic offiers three methods for payment: Credit Card and/or PayPal and/or Account Credits combinations. 

• Account Credits:  Credits can be added anytime. Under the billing tab in Finances you may choose to use the credits on your account or not. Payments are authorized in real time and charged in full once we approve your campaigns. When the campaign progress bar on the right reaches 100%, your campaign is ready to start! 

When the campaign progress bar on the right reaches 100%, your campaign is ready to start! 

In order to be approved creatives must adhere to all ad specifications and guidelines previously mentioned. Once verified, campaigns will be approved and ads will begin running. Ads are usually approved with in 2 hour, and always within 24hrs. If an ad is rejected, reasons for dismissal will be provided.

*Note: A campaign will serve as long as there is one approved creative.  

Retargeting and Conversion Codes 

Retargeting Code (Video)

Place the retargeting code on every page of your site that would correspond to the activity you wish to retarget. If it is a user visit to your site, and your site gets visitors to pages other than the home page, place the retargeting code into your site template.

• If you want to exclude users who get to a particular page, you can use the "un-pixel" code to remove them.
• If you are trying to get users to convert one time, then you would "un-pixel" the users who reach the "thank you" page where you confirm they have completed the transaction. These users will then not be retargeted.

The following video gives you a walk-through on how to create a retargeting campaign on CPMatic.com:

Conversion Tracking Codes

Conversion codes track a desired action by a user on your page. Be it a lead form or purchase, we suggest placing a conversion tracking code and setting realistic CPA goals. The code is a piece of javascript that is created by CPMatic when a "conversion" event is generated.

 Place the code on the page that a user will get to IF AND ONLY IF they have completed the action you are interested in, like a sale, finished completing a lead form, etc. The code you select on the campaign setup screen can be a code you have previously created in CPMatic,or you can create a new code

• Give the new code a name and an optional description for your own reference. 

Auto vs Manual Campaigns

Auto Campaigns

Choosing to run an "Auto" campaign, you are allowing the CPMatic system to analyze and automate your campaign for you. It ensures that you are paying a competitive price for inventory and are not overpaying a publisher or partner. Auto campaigns DO NOT ask for CPM or CPC prices, rather targets and budget. Auto campaigns are good if you do not know what CPM or CPC to pay. Our intelligent ad system learns by constantly running tests and works to optimize your performance, and combining that with our history data on billions of ad impressions and websites, we figure out where to buy and the right price to bid or pay.

Manual Campaigns (Recommended)

Choosing to run a "Manual" campaign allows you to determine and optimize your campaign toward specific goals and targets.

Manual campaigns allow you to set goals based on Maximum Dynamic CPM (dCPM), Fixed CPM and CPA Hybrids.

• dCPM (recommended): Based on realtime auctions, we recommend dCPM because it usually sees the best inventory. It is especially suggested for retargeting campaigns. 
•  Fixed CPM . 
• CPA Hybrid:  Allows you to bid on a CPA basis (you pay for every conversion) and covers our adserving costs if your campaign does not receive conversions quickly. CPMatic optimizes toward a CPA, while bidding at CPM and CPC.
• Note: CPMatic is sometimes unable to run inventory on a CPA basis because the best inventory has been taken by CPM campaigns.  Our system will prioritize your ads based on how well they are performing in generating revenue for the publisher and CPMatic will turn off your campaign if it doesn’t convert well. More details on the hybrid CPA is available in the Goals and Pricing sections. 

Choosing Data Segments

When building a campaign you can choose specific segments and providers you want to buy from. Just go to the section, "Available Data Provider Segments" and click on the arrows to expand the data providers. At any time you can select a segment or subsegment by clicking the Add button next to that segments name. You can click on the arrows to further expand each segment in turn. Once added you will see the name of the segment and subsegment(s) in the window above.

When the campaign starts, these will purchase the provided segments from the data providers f subject to the data budget you have provided. The pricing for data provider segments varies, but is typically either a fixed or variable CPM fee (BlueKai – usually $1.00+) or a revenue share (eXelate or AlmondNet) that typically varies from 20-30%. CPMatic will purchase these segments for your campaign at a zero cost markup.

Optimization Tips and Tricks

Behavioral Campaign Tips

• In most cases, the more creatives you have the better. Limiting your campaign to only one or two ad sizes will limit the inventory where your ad can be shown.
• Pay to play: at the minimum of $200, a behaviorally targeted campaign may have trouble delivering since the system will be conservative in allocating budget among multiple servers. The larger your budget, the more inventory you will have access to. If you have a $200 data budget and a $200 media budget, the data will probably only be 30% of the media costs. The results from such a small test are probably not going to be representative of larger-scale campaigns.
• Setting an appropriate CPM on a behavioral campaign is paramount. Other buyers are likely competing for the same behavioral segments; average CPM's for behavioral campaigns are usually over $1 in the US. We would suggest a dynamic bid of at least $1.50, although you won't necessarily pay this much due to the nature of dynamic bidding.
• Similarly, don't be overly aggressive with CPC goals since this will cause adservers to limit impressions.