Before you build

When you're working on a client's campaign, stay in touch with your media agency contact so you know what to build and when to build it by. Before you get started on development, we recommend learning the following about your client's campaign:

Know your client's timeline

Creative development is one of many steps in a rich media campaign. Make sure you know your client’s timeline so that you can create assets with enough time for revision, QA, trafficking, and site testing.

Recommended campaign timeline

Creative agencies are involved with creative development and QA, and these steps can affect the rest of the campaign timeline.

In addition to creative development time, we recommend you add five days for QA. Each round of QA is 24 hours. If a unit doesn't pass, you’ll need a day or two to make revisions and resubmit for another 24-hour turnaround. For more complex creatives like homepage takeovers or custom formats, we recommend that you allot for additional rounds of QA.

Know your client's reporting needs

Advertisers want to know how effective their ads are. They want to see if users engage with their ads, watch their videos, play their games, etc. Tracking lets an advertiser learn what works and what doesn't work with their target audience.

Some metrics are automatically tracked with Rich Media standard metrics, but if you want to track specific metrics, for example, how many times a user clicked on a button in your creative, or how long a user played a game in your creative, you need to add custom tracking to capture that information.

You can implement custom tracking in your creative using the components and API provided by Studio. There are three categories of custom metrics:

• counters
• exits
• timers

The media agency should go over any extra tracking they want implemented in the creative so you know which custom metrics to build into your creatives.

Know the site specifications

Site specs are rules that publishers have about things like file size, which direction ads can expand in, how long video can be, how big buttons can be, etc.

The media agency should provide you with a list of site specs. They may also direct you to Studio developer best practices, which are specs based on industry standards.

Pay close attention to site specifications. Studio doesn’t make these rules, but we want publishers to accept your ads, so your QA contact tests against site specs. If your creatives break specifications, you may need to spend extra time in the QA process making revisions, which can delay your campaign.