Ad Refresh: How to set up and use Ad Refresh

Ad Refresh: How to set up and use Ad Refresh

Ad Refresh lets a single ad zone show more than one ad during the same page view. Instead of loading one creative and leaving it in place, the zone automatically loads a fresh ad after a set interval, so a visitor who stays on the page sees several different advertisers over time. This gives you more viewable impressions from the same placement and more chances for advertisers to compete for it, without you having to add extra zones to your site.

The feature is set per zone in the Admin Panel, so if your zones are already live with the asynchronous script, you don't need to touch your site code to turn it on.

Which zones support Ad Refresh

You'll find the Ad Refresh option on the following zone formats:

• Banner
• Instant Message
• Sticky Banner
• Mobile Banner
• Mobile Instant Message
• Recommendation Widget (Native)

For Multi-Format zones, Ad Refresh doesn't appear as its own setting, but it still applies as long as every zone inside the Multi-Format has Ad Refresh enabled.

How to enable Ad Refresh

1. Go to the Sites & Zones tab and click New Zone (or open an existing zone to edit it).
2. Select a supported format (for example, Banner) and click Next.
3. Fill out your zone details as usual.
4. Find the Ad Refresh option and choose your refresh interval: 30, 60, 90, or 120 seconds. Enabled by default at 30 seconds.
5. Finish setting up the zone and click Create (or Save).
6. Make sure the zone is implemented with the Asynchronous Script on your site. Ad Refresh only works with the async tag, not with the iFrame tag.

<script async type="application/javascript" src="https://a.magsrv.com/ad-provider.js"></script>

<ins class="eas6a97888e" data-zoneid="123456"></ins>

<script>
(AdProvider = window.AdProvider || []).push({"serve": {}});
</script>

That's it. Once the zone is live, it will start refreshing at the interval you chose.

How it works

A few things happen behind the scenes to keep the refreshed impressions of high quality:

• It only refreshes while the ad is on screen. The timer for a zone runs only while that zone is inside the visitor's viewport. If the visitor scrolls the ad out of view, the timer pauses, and it picks up again when the ad comes back into view. An ad that nobody is looking at won't refresh.
• It won't repeat the same advertiser. The refresh serves a different campaign each time, where possible, so the same visitor doesn't keep seeing the same ad over and over.
• It refreshes up to 10 times per visitor. After a zone has refreshed 10 times for a given visitor, it stops refreshing for the rest of that page view.

Ad Refresh on Native (Recommendation Widget) zones

Ad Refresh is also available on Recommendation Widget zones, with the same intervals (30, 60, 90, or 120 seconds) and the same cap of 10 refreshes per visitor as banners.

Because a Native widget shows several ads at once, all the ads in the widget refresh together on each cycle. A refresh only happens when there are enough eligible ads to fill every slot in the widget, so it never ends up looking half-empty.

Tips for getting the most out of Ad Refresh

• Ad Refresh performs best on placements that stay visible for a while, such as mobile headers or desktop placements that a visitor keeps in view as they read or browse.
• Because refreshing is tied to viewability, placements that are quickly scrolled past will refresh less often (or not at all), which is expected behaviour.