We just added new controls for intelligent ad rotation! These controls work with AdPlugg’s timed rotate feature.

As many of you know, you can set a Rotation Interval on your AdPlugg Placements (and have your ads rotate on a timer – at the interval of your choice). See our blog post from 2015 announcing the timed rotate feature. As many of you have also found out, this can get quite expensive as ads may rotate for quite a long time.

We’ve been working on how to address this issue: to allow you to rotate your ads on a timer but to do it in a sane way. We are calling our solution “Intelligent Ad Rotation”. There are now two new controls on the Placement form to facilitate the new solution.

Viewability Timeout

The first new control is labeled “Pause Timed Rotation When Not Viewable?”. As can be inferred by the name, when enabled, this control will stop your ads from rotating when the ad Zone is not within view. We use the MRC (Media Rating Council) standard that recommends that 51% of the ad should be within view for the ad to be considered viewable. So if the user scrolls to a location on the page where the ad is no longer visible, the ad will stop rotating.

Note that this feature is enabled by default on all new Placements. If you want to use this feature with your existing Placements, you will need to edit them and turn this feature on.

Inactivity Timeout

The second control is labeled “Timed Rotation Inactivity Timeout”. This control allows you to set the number of seconds of inactivity to allow before the rotation times out. The default is 5 seconds. So with this field set to 5 seconds, if the user stops interacting with the page (scrolling, clicking, etc) for more than 5 seconds, the ad rotation will be paused. If the user starts, interacting with the page again, rotation will resume.

Where Can I See an Example?

We’ve enabled both of these controls on our Timed Rotate Demo.

To test the inactivity timeout on the demo page, stop touching your mouse and keyboard. After 5 seconds, the ads will stop rotating. Move your mouse and the ads will start rotating again.

To test the viewability timeout, scroll down until just a small part of the ad is visible, the ads will stop rotating. Scroll back up so that the ad is within view and the ads will start rotating again.

Should I Use It?

Yes, the new controls are available for all plans and it is recommended that every publisher (who wants to rotate their ads on a timer) use both of these features.

The features ensure that you aren’t registering impressions for ads that no-one is looking at. This is obviously a more fair way to calculate impressions for your advertisers but is also likely to lower your own AdPlugg bill.

Really the only time that you wouldn’t want to use these features is for sites that might be used in a kiosk type setting or on sites that show long form videos.

Have Questions?

Have a question? Post it to the comments section below or feel free to contact us.