Our website has traditionally focused on the advertiser side of the digital space, however publishers have always played a huge role in what we do and how we reach new audiences. And since they are such an important part of our ecosystem, we decided to revamp our publisher.ad.net page and our publisher portal to reflect that and it’s finally live! We are proud to say it was all done in-house, everything from the design to wireframing to architecture. As our senior engineering manager and project lead, Jenson Crawford said “by doing all the work in-house we were able to respond more nimbly to the changing advertising technology landscape.”
Pre – redesign, there was no part of our website that explained the advertising opportunities for Ad.net publishers. The only element of our site that was publisher facing was the pub portal, which was a not so easy-to-use system for tracking performance on ad placements. Laura Morrison, Ad.net project manager and project lead, said “the new design is clean, modern and now there’s a focus on the products we offer. I wanted a publisher to visit our site and know exactly what it is we do. I also wanted to make sure we weren’t turning off any pubs. We have something for everyone – larger pubs, smaller pubs, and pubs who represent all different niches.” There are no limitations to what type of publisher we are able to work with. When asked about the pub site facelift Crawford explained “Advertising technology is continually evolving, and Ad.net has been leading this evolution with our publisher focused products. We gave the publisher side of our web site a facelift to better communicate the benefits of our expanding publisher focused products, and to match the look and feel of our newly revamped publisher portal.”
As for the redesign of the pub portal, Morrison explained, “The old Ad.net pub portal was not intuitive. There was no visual representation of your performance and it was not user friendly.” Now you can see a graphical summary trending up and down (without needing to download anything into a spreadsheet) and you can easily see the performance of your website’s different ad placements. When asked what his first step was for tackling this project, Crawford said, “It really came down to differentiating ourselves from competitors and creating an extensible system to manage our growing publisher product portfolio”. Morrison added “It’s so simple to use and understand. With the new pub interface smaller publishers, who may not be as well versed in the digital space, will see how simple it is to track performance. We want to maximize revenue potential for our publishers without any added headache.” And even though the portal is now easily navigable we’ll still continue to offer our awesome fully managed service, offering suggestions based on your site’s performance. Don’t worry, we’re still here to help!
What’s next you ask? According to Morrison and Crawford there are a few next phases or feature releases in the works. From Crawford’s team “One of the big things we have on the horizon is a new API that will make the functionality of the publisher portal available for integration by the publishers’ technology teams.” And as for Morrison, whose main focus has been functionality and ease of use, “more interactivity and insights for publishers and of course continuing to build great products.”
To learn more about becoming an Ad.net publisher click here.
