As Online Adverting continues it’s incredible growth and we see more and more publishers monetize their content with some form of advertising we also see new platforms enter the market to meet this demand for ad serving solutions. In this battle for market share features are wielded as proof of a platforms ad serving prowess. RTB support! Yield Optimization! Business Intelligence! Super Granular Targeting! Even washes the dishes!
At the same time that feature sets are growing and innovating there’s also a race to offer more for less. There are many reasons for this but probably the biggest reason is that big media companies buy up independent ad servers because they want access to publisher data and media (not so much for the revenue they bill the publishers). When operating a profitable business isn’t the goal (feeding the media beast is the goal) these companies begin offering platforms for free. When free comes along the first offering to go is often the biggest cost — Support. And if a product is mature and easy to use with good documentation then maybe customers don’t use support so much. I think it’s safe to say that online advertising is not a mature market and the tools are often complex, so support should very much be a requirement, not something tossed out just to keep the costs down.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
New customers will often opt out of expensive support agreements because it’s not within their budget and frankly, they don’t always need the Cadillac (kids these days would say the Mercedes). This can fool an ad server into thinking that they don’t need to offer support if so many people are balking at buying their support offering. What customers really want is flexibility to have support plans where they can get help through the channels and at the times that they need it. With our own ad server and customer base we heard loud and clear that 1 type of support won’t fit every customer (which is why each adOS account can be configured with a different support level).
Things to consider when deciding the type of support level that best fits:
- Is someone always working in your ad server? More than 1 person? — Time your team spends waiting for a response or troubleshooting on their own is time they aren’t being productive
- Are you serving ads for high paying advertisers that in turn will expect good support from you? — When you receive a call asking about discrepancies are you ready to drop everything to dig into it without help?
- Do you work late at night or in a time zone thats different from your ad server? — Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone available on your schedule?
FREE is Good Enough For Me
If you don’t need support then everything is going as planned but it should either be there for you to use or it should be easy for you to ‘turn it on’ when you need it. And don’t discount the peace of mind that having a team of experts available can provide, even if you don’t call them. Because each customer has different needs with different advertisers and employees and sites and timelines — having support is often critical.
Getting started with a new ad server should be easy… but honestly, you’re not going to have a great experience unless you have someone to turn to when a question pops up.
Where’s the geotargeting settings? The terminology is different from my last ad server, what’s a flight? Can you check the ad code to make sure I did it right?
But you say you won’t need support once you get off the ground because you’re a fast learner and not doing anything unusual. Because of customers like you we made support optional — and easy to turn on if the day comes that you change your mind (with no commitments). If the day comes that one of your customers calls you with a problem that you need help troubleshooting — and fast, or you just want someone to give feedback on the way you set everything up, make sure your ad server is backed up by a first class support feature.
If you’re still undecided about how important having accessible support with your ad server is here’s a short list of the top support cases that we see across our customer base. Having worked for multiple publisher ad servers I think these are also pretty common across the industry and not specific to any ad server.
Top Support Questions:
- I signed up a new Advertiser and they want targeting or tracking that I’ve never done. How do I set that up? (aka: refresher training)
- I got a creative from an Advertiser and it’s not displaying/tracking correctly. (aka: help me troubleshoot third party ad code)
- My advertiser or publisher has a question and I don’t know the answer. (aka: help me support my own customers)
- Something isn’t working right… (aka: software has bugs and I found one. ) I’d be lying if I said this never happens with Adzerk; any product that’s still being developed is going to have some hiccups occasionally. Regardless of whether you have support we do our best to fix these issues quickly. After all, we’re measured by how we respond when everything goes sideways, right?
Given your own experience, did I miss any common reasons that support is a “must have”? Do you disagree? Let’s hear it in the comments!