SAS 360 Match Advanced Tracking and Viewability

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SAS 360 Match is a sophisticated advertising management platform designed to deliver highly targeted and optimized digital advertising campaigns allowing you to plan, manage, forecast, serve, optimize and measure advertising inventory across all platforms.

In this post, we'll look at two of the advanced features available in SAS 360 Match: Advanced Tracking and Viewability.

Advanced Tracking

SAS 360 Match provides two advanced features to track user actions: Action Tracking and Custom Tracking.

Action Tracking

Action Tracking simply associates specific actions, like being seen or clicked on by a user, to creatives within a flight. There are two simple steps to this process:

The URL that tracks the action is placed on the action success page as follows (Figure 1), notifying SAS 360 Match to count it:

Figure 1

Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.

A value is entered in the Cost Per Action field in the Goals and Revenue section of the Edit Flight page in the software.

Let's look at an example. Suppose you are managing a website for a major tech company and want to track all purchases made through activities in a campaign. Here is the syntax used for this action tracking (Figure 2):

Figure 2

{ad server domain} = aimatch.com
/count/ denotes the counting service
{shortname} = Purchase-Confirmation
act=3 denotes a standard action tracking count URL.
FCID is the Flight Creative ID. In this example {FCID} would be replaced by an actual FCID. The FCID for a creative may be found in the user interface next to the name of the creative at the bottom of the Edit Flight page.

Custom Tracking

Custom Tracking is the creation and reporting of user-defined events. These actions are triggered and logged using specific URLs referencing either the custom action ID or the action name and assigning the related unique advertiser identifier. Again, this is a two step process:

The URL that tracks the action is placed on the action success page as follows (Figure 3), notifying SAS 360 Match to count it:

Figure 3

Completion of the Action Policies section of the Edit Flight page in the software. The active period for impressions or clicks is controlled by the action policy that is set for each action on the flight. Flights without an action policy are not tracked unless the action-tracking URL contains a valid FCID value.

Here's an example syntax for tracking video view percentages of video ads (Figure 4). It searches the visitor's history for a flight associated with advertiser 4 with the most recent click or impression. Only flights that have policies for the action named videostart are considered.

Figure 4

{ad server domain} = aimatch.com
/count/ denotes the counting service
ADVID is the Advertiser ID value. In this example the advertiser ID is 4. The ADVID value can be found in the URL of the Edit Advertiser page in the software.
Finally, this example uses the actname=videostart. A Custom Tracking URL can use either the actname or actid. If both are present, the actname is ignored.

Viewability

Viewability is a count of how many times a creative has been viewed on a browser or device. A view is counted when a specified amount of the creative’s content is visible in the browser window, and it has been viewed for a specified period of time. When those two thresholds have been met, the creative is considered viewed.

To activate viewability, first place the SAS 360 Match JavaScript library code snippet shown below (Figure 5) on every page where viewability is needed.

Figure 5

Then, place the viewability ID and class attributes in the IMG, Iframe, and Script HTML tags (Figure 6):

Figure 6

Viewability can be assigned to every creative type, including custom creatives, image-based creatives and more. Viewability tracking works only with jserver and bserver ad call methods. These attributes may be added directly to the IMG and IFRAME HTML tag as shown in figure 7. However, when adding these attributes to a Javascript or SCRIPT HTML tag, a span tag must be used to surround the tag (Figure 8).

Figure 7

Figure 8

For more information about SAS 360 Match please see the SAS 360 Match Essentials and SAS 360 Match Mastery courses available in the Customer Intelligence 360 learning subscription or if you're a partner, you may find these same courses in PartnerNet. For more information on SAS 360 Match Advanced Features, see the SAS 360 Match Advanced Features Guide. All links can be found below.

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