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Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash
Imagine a designer to help you decorate your living room. You’ve hired this expert to help you select the best furniture for your budget and taste. It’s likely the consultant has shown you photos of recommended furniture, and how it will appear in your exact space. You agree with the vision and sign off on it. Expensive purchases are made on your behalf.
Now imagine walking in to see your new living room for the first time and the couch is a slightly different color and style. How will you react?
When advertisers launch campaigns and request ad screenshots, they want to see how those ads actually appeared to real consumers, not approximations. But few AdOps teams can deliver on that promise (through no fault of their own). They simply lack the tools needed to capture screenshots of actual ads, and so they must jerry rig an approximation.
For AdOps teams within agencies, that level of jerry-rigging is a tedious, manual and time-consuming process. They typically start with a screenshot of the ad taken in isolation. Next, they take a screenshot of a website page that has an ad unit (e.g. banner ad, tower ad, video ad) that was purchased as part of that campaign, and layer the ad creative on top of it.
It’s a huge amount of work to create an image of what the ad creative “could” have looked like -- not a real life representation of the experience to the end user. Did the ad render correctly? Was it shown in the right context? The AdOps team has no real proof to answer these questions.
This is the reality for 99% of AdOps teams. Only a tiny fraction of agencies modify the code on the website and inject the ad on the page in the browser via the console.
Meanwhile, publishers typically use the Google Preview URL feature, which allows them to push one ad at a time to an URL, which then forces the ad to display. While slightly easier, this approach is still tedious when followed at scale. It also comes with other issues, such as the ultimate ad screenshot might not meet the campaign’s criteria, such as contextual or audience criteria. In such circumstances, the AdOps team has created a report that raises red flags for the client, resulting in telephone calls and escalations.
Once the AdOps team has created all of the ad screenshots they must then assemble all of them into a report that is client ready.
All clients, regardless of budget size, deserve to see how their ads really appeared to their end users, in real online scenarios. But as we’ve seen, most AdOps teams lack the tools to provide ad screenshot mockups to just a handful of clients. Providing it to all advertisers is simply impossible.
That’s why we introduced Programmatic Screenshots for Agencies. And Direct Screenshots for Publishers. Once a campaign goes live, Adwallet grabs screenshots of all ads, the URL in which they appeared and time stamps them automatically.
Those screenshots are stored in a dedicated campaign folder and waiting for the appropriate AdOps team member. When they’re ready to report to the client, they simply need to select which ads to include. AdWallet automatically formats them into a fully branded report, which the team member can download and send to the client in just a few clicks.
Here’s the bottomline: Your team members can send real-life screenshots for all ad units for all clients, and do so quickly and easily.
Want to see Programmatic Screenshots or Direct Screenshots in real life? Reach out and schedule a demo.
