DVMS Co.,Ltd

Adhere is a comprehensive mobile advertising platform. The Adhere Ad Server and the Adhere User Profiles Server are offered open source and are posted on sourceforge

Introduction
This guide describes how to use Adhere Ad Server. The guide is intentionally brief and describes the features for new Ad Server administrators.

Note: For the system to work properly, Make sure that JavaScript is enabled on your browser.

Download on https://sourceforge.net/projects/adheremobileadv/

install with PHP 5.2

Login
To login to the web application, enter the username and password that are saved during installation. Upon login in, the adminstrator will be directed to the “Inventory – Advertises & Campaigns” page. To change the password, go to “Settings – Main Settings” and then choose “Administrator Settings” from drop down list. In case the administrator forgets the password, he may ask for it to be sent by email to the administrator's email address on record.

Once the administrator logs on, he has access to the dashboard which provides the following main tabs:

• Inventory : The inventory tab is the main configuration tool for the externally-visible ad server functions. It is divided into two parts:
  
  • Advertisers & Campaigns
  • Operators
• Statistics: The statistics tab shows reports about the served ads in the form of tables and charts.
• Settings: The settings tab mainly includes internal settings of the server such as the database settings, … etc.

1 Inventory
1.1 Advertisers & Campaigns
Go to the "Inventory - Advertisers & Campaigns" tab to manage the advertisers and their campaigns:

• To display or edit the stored information of an existing advertiser, simply click on the advertiser's name. In the same manner, to display or edit the stored information of campaigns attached to an advertiser, click on the campaign's name after choosing that certain advertiser.
• To add a new advertiser click on the “Add new advertiser” link and follow the steps below:
  
  • Enter the advertiser's name, the contact person's name and email address, and indicate whether the advertiser wishes to receive communications and reports by email.
  • To add a new campaign for an advertiser, configure:
    
    • Campaign name
    • Duration: activation date and expiration date
    • Campaign budget: number of impressions to be shown
    • Priority settings: Adhere supports three priority levels: Exclusive, High, and Low. The high priority can be divided into and additional 10 sub-priorities. In addition, campaigns are also assigned a weight value ranging from 1 to 10. The ad serving engine uses the priorities and weights and other parameters to fairly serve ads from all campaigns without starving any of them. The scheduling algorithm has been inherited from OpenX. A white paper titled "Priority and trafficking examples tutorial" describes the algorithm in detail.
    • Delivery capping: limiting the number of times ads from a given campaign are served during a given period of time
  • Select operator(s) and link them to the newly created campaign. By default, a new campaign is not linked to any operators. Ads from that campaign can only be served to linked operators.
  • Add new ads to the campaign. This is accomplished by clicking on the “Add new ad” link on the Ad Overview tab. The following types of ads are available:
    • Text SMS: A text ad for insertion into SMS
    • Picture SMS: An ad consisting of a bitmap optionally followed by text to be inserted into an SMS
    • Picture Ad: Supported formats are : jpg, gif, bmp and png. The default maximum size is 300 KB
    • Audio Ad: Supported formats are : wav, midi, aac and amr. The default maximum size is 300 KB
    • Video Ad: Supported formats are : mp4, 3gp and 3g2 . The default maximum size is 300 KB
    • Web Banner: A web banner consisting of an image and a tagline hyper-linked to a URL. Supported formats for image are : gif, png, and jpg
    • Web Text: A web ad consisting of text that is hyper-linked to a URL. The default maximum size is 35 characters
    For all the above ad types, we support the media formats and dimensions specified in the guidelines of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). The maximum size for multimedia types (picture, audio, and video) and the maximum size for the web text ads are configurable at “Settings – Main Settings – Ad Settings”.

    Adhere supports two character sets:

    • ASCII (for English and other ASCII-based languages)
    • Unicode (for Arabic, Chinese, ... etc.)
    
    An ad may be targeted. The "Ad Properties" tab includes targeting based on:
    • Keywords (describing the user's interests)
    • Locations
    • Device Types (identifying the mobile handset of the user)
    The keywords, locations, device types are organized in tree formats. An ad may be targeted to multiple keywords and/or multiple locations and/or multiple device types. The administrator can create/edit the keywords, locations, and device types trees at “Settings – Main Settings – Keyword Settings”, “Settings – Main Settings – Location Settings”, and “Settings – Main Settings – DeviceType Settings” respectively.
  • Additional ad targeting criteria are provided under the “Delivery Limitations” tab. These criteria are:
    • Profile - Age
    • Profile - Gender
    • Profile - Number Prefix
    • Profile - Purchasing Power
    • LimitationGroup - Preconfigured
    • Time – Date
    • Time – Day of Week
    • Time – Hour of day
    The "LimitationGroup - Preconfigured" is a preconfigured set of targeting criteria (managed at "Settings - Limitation Group Management") to save the administrator the time and effort required to re-enter the same targeting criteria many times.

    The use of targeting is optional. When targeting is used, an ad will only be served if all targeting conditions are met.

1.2 Operators
Go to "Inventory - Operators" tab for operator management:

• To Display and edit the stored information of an operator, simply click on the operator's name
• To add a new operator click on the “Add new operator” link. It consists of the following steps:
  • Enter the operator’s name, contact information, and payment information under the "Operator Properties" tab
  • The "Account Configuration" tab displays an automatically assigned accountid for the operator. It also lets the admin assign a password for the operator and to indicate which types of ads this operator is authorized to request.
  • The "Linked Ads" tab is used to select the campaigns and ads which are permitted for this operator. Any other ads cannot be served to this operator.

2 Statistics
The "Statistics" tab is used for monitoring the advertising activity and generating reports in different formats. Statistics can be generated:

• per advertiser,
• per campaign,
• per operator, or
• globally for the entire system.

In all the above cases, the administrator specifies the range of dates for which the statistics should be shown. Under a campaign, the administrator can request to view the statistics for each individual ad in that campaign. In addition, if an advertiser or a campaign is active across multiple operators, the administrator can view the distribution of the advertising activity across the multiple operators.

Similarly, the advertising activity can be shown for each operator. In addition, if multiple campaigns are active on the same operator, statistics on the campaign distribution per operator can be shown.

In all the above cases, the statistics shown are the number of impressions (ads served) per day. In addition, the statistics can be expanded to show the hourly activities for a specific day.

By default the statistics are presented in table format. However the administrator can also view the statistics as charts (Note: Adhere Ad Server requires the php5-gd module to be loaded in order to be able to generate charts).

The administrator can export any set of the above statistics to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for external processing.

3 Settings
There are four main tabs under "Settings": Main setting, Maintenance, User Log, and Limitation Group Management.

3.1 Main Settings

• Administrator Settings
  
  • Login Credentials contains the credentials used for the administrator to log in (user name and password)
  • Basic Information contains information about the administrator himself. His full name, email address, and company name.
  • Preferences includes some options that the administrator can enable or disable.
    • Administrator delete actions need confirmation for safety.
    • Log all outgoing email messages.
    • Automatically perform maintenance during delivery if scheduled maintenance is not set up. This option enables the statistics to be automatically calculated. If unchecked, you have to write a scheduled job that runs periodically to update the statistics database.
  • Time zone information keeps the time updated according to your time zone.

• Ad Settings
  • Allowed Ad Types indicates the ad types configured on this server.
  • Maximum Sizes indicates the maximum size for multimedia ads in KB and for web text Ads in number of characters.

• Database Settings
  • Global Database Server Settings include database type, name, port number, username, password, and server name.
  • Database Optimization Settings includes a check box for using persistent connections. If checked, the database connection is kept alive during the whole session to improve performance. There is a potential disadvantage, however, when the number of ad requests is very large, the load on the server can increase and become larger than when using non-persistent connections. Whether you should use persistent or non-persistent connections depends on the number of requests anticipated and the hardware you are using.

• Delivery Settings
  • Global Adhere Ad Server Access Paths parameters can be edited under Delivery Settings. This group of settings defines access paths to specific elements of your Adhere Ad Server. These are specified by default when you first install the application.
    • Admin Interface URL: The URL by which you will access your Adhere Ad Server installation's user interface.
    • Delivery Engine URL: The URL that will be used for delivering ads.
    • Delivery Engine URL (SSL): The URL that will be used for delivering ads over SSL connections.
    • Image Store URL: The URL that will be used for delivering ad files.
    • Image Store URL (SSL): The URL that will be used for delivering ad files over SSL connections.
  • Global Delivery Caching Settings indicates the period till cache expiration in seconds.
  • Global Ad Delivery Settings. All boxes are selected by default to enable the enforcement of targeting criteria (delivery limitations, keywords, locations & device types) during the selection and delivery of ads.
  • Match Preference Settings applies to targeting based keywords, locations & device types. For each of them, there are two possible settings:
    • Select all matching ads
    • Select only ads with longest match
    Example: An application requests an ad for a user with device type = ->Nokia->E Series->E71. Adhere Ad Server has two ads:
    • Ad1 targeted for device type = ->Nokia->E Series
    • Ad2 targeted for device type = ->Nokia->E Series->E71
    If "Select only ads with longest match" is selected, Ad1 is discarded and only Ad2 is considered for delivery. If, on the other hand, "Select all matching ads" is selected, both Ad1 & Ad2 are sent to the scheduler to select one of them for delivery.

    WARNING: Choosing the "Select only ads with longest match" option narrows down the number of the candidate ads significantly. We strongly recommend that you do not choose the "Select only ads with longest match" option for more than one of the categories (keywords, locations, device types). Otherwise, there will be a significant probability that the Adhere Ad Server won't find any matching ads.

• General Settings
  • Production Server option indicates that this is a production server and not used for testing; suppressing any error and debugging messages in delivery, ensuring that the system doesn't return any PHP messages to the requesting application.
  • User Interface Enabled checkbox, selected by default, controls the availability of the user interface. There may be certain changes or other maintenance operations you want to carry out where the user interface ought to be disabled, in which case you de-select the checkbox. Take care when choosing to disable the user interface as you will not be able to log in to the admin interface subsequently. You can, however, alter your configuration file directly to enable the user interface again, by changing the uiEnabled value to "1".
  • Force SSL Access checkbox, when selected permits only secure access to the Adhere Ad Server's user interface.

• Interface Defaults
  • Inventory Options has various options that enable and disable extra interface options including:
    • Show extra campaign info on Campaign overview page
    • Show extra ad info on Ad overview page
    • Show preview of all ads on Ad overview page
    • Show ad preview at the top of pages which deal with ad
    
    Note: Default display settings, enforced at login time only. These settings will be overridden by user preferences during session.
    • Hide inactive items from all overview pages
    • Show matching ads on the Linked ad pages
    • Show parent campaigns on the Linked ad pages
  • Default weights are the default weights assigned to ads and campaigns and used by the delivery engine to fairly select between ads of equal priority.

• Statistics and Maintenance Settings
  • Global Statistics Logging Settings identifies events that trigger Adhere Ad Server to create log entries.
  • Global Maintenance Settings. Adhere runs a maintenance script periodically at a configurable interval (of at least 60 minutes) to convert the raw statistics generated during the operation into readable intelligible format.
  • Global Priority Settings. Adhere recalculates the ad weights and priorities used by the scheduler every time the statistics maintenance script runs. If this feature is enabled, it recalculates the weights and priorities immediately when a change is made in the UI and does not wait till the maintenance period expires.
  • Email Warnings identifies events that trigger email alerts to the administrators and advertisers.
  • If qmail is used instead of sendmail, a qmail patch must be enabled.

• Keyword Settings The keywords edit tool permits the administrator to add/remove/edit keywords and to organize them hierarchically.

• Location Settings The locations edit tool permits the administrator to add/remove/edit locations and to organize them hierarchically.

• Device Type Settings The device types edit tool permits the administrator to add/remove/edit device types and to organize them hierarchically.

3.2 Maintenance

• Maintenance The Maintenance option checks if automatic maintenance is running correctly. You can turn on automatic maintenance form Settings > Main Settings > Administrator Settings. As an alternative to automatic maintenance, you can write a script to perform scheduled maintenance. For more information, visit the "Configuring maintenance" page of OpenX.

• Priority Adhere Ad Server calculates campaign priorities automatically. If you want to perform a manual calculation for troubleshooting purposes, click the "Recalculate priority" link.

• Delivery Limitations Under some circumstances the delivery engine can disagree with the stored delivery limitation rules. This link is used to re-validate the rules in the database.

3.3 User Log
In this tab, administrators can view a maintenance log and the log of all outgoing email messages.

3.4 Limitation Group Management
Advertisers may want to target a certain users segment that can be described with multiple criteria, e.g. males over 25 who like sports or females under 35 who enjoy fashion and shopping. The administrator can preconfigure limitation groups for each such users segment and make them available for the campaigns to apply them directly instead of having to re-write the targeting criteria from scratch each time a campaign is created.