Features Ad Serving

Email Ad Serving

You can manage and display advertising in email messages and newsletters with AdSpeed's email ad server.

Pricing

Email ad serving is included in all of our Premium plans at no extra charge.

Email Ad Formats

Email services and software have several technical restrictions that disable certain ad serving functionality. Many email client software and service do not support or allow JavaScript, IFRAME tag, cookie for security and privacy reasons. Therefore, rich-media, and third-party HTML ads will not display in most email clients and you should avoid these ad formats for email. Image banner ads are the most common for email advertising and they can be created like other image ad banners that you display on your website.

Ad Tag for Email/Newsletter

There are two options to get the email ad tag:

For a specific Ad: Display any individual image or text ad in email by clicking on the ad name, click on "Ad Tag" tab and choose the format to be Simplified/Email.
For an Email Zone: Rotate image ads with a zone for email/newsletter

Mixing Ad Dimensions

When you generate the email ad tag for a zone, it is set to display "Any" ad dimension by default. The width and height attribute of the banner image is skipped and ignored, allowing you to mix banners of different sizes together. Of course, you can select a specific dimension if you want to narrow to banners of a certain size.

Hiding Errors and Collapsing Ad Space

If you do not have an ad available in the zone and do not want your visitor to see the default error, you can hide errors. Additionally, if you want to avoid taking up valuable space when there is no ad, choose "Any" as the ad dimension or manually remove the "width" and "height" attribute of the IMG tag. This will display a regular ad when there is an available ad and display an almost-invisible 1x1 transparent GIF pixel when there is an error like "No Ad Found" or "Restriction Failed".

Image size issue in Outlook

By default, our email ad tag includes a standard CSS rule max-width:100% to make ad images responsive on different devices and screen sizes. However, Outlook email software on desktop is known to have issues handling regular CSS rules so it might not resize a wide ad image properly. Therefore, a tweak to the ad tag is needed if you have a significant email audience reading your newsletter using Outlook.

Image Proxy

Certain email service providers use image proxy servers to request and cache images, including ad images, and then re-display them to their users. When the email is opened the first time, an ad request is made to the adserver directly from the image proxy server. The client's actual IP address is hidden. If this email is viewed again while the proxy server's cache is active, images will be served from the proxy server and no additional ad requests are made. Additionally, email vendors can use proxy servers to click on links in email to preview and scan for potential viruses on the landing page. This can affect the accuracy of impression, click tracking, ad start/end date, reporting and geotargeting features.

Google's Gmail and its hosted email services use image proxy servers for all incoming emails. This means it is Google's server that is detected by our adservers as the viewer of an email ad. Yahoo and some other email providers also use a similar setup. To enhance geo-targeting accuracy in email ad serving, AdSpeed Ad Server supports Geolocation API for email ad tags. If known and consented, you can supply the latitude and longitude data of the recipient directly into the ad tag and our ad server will use that data for geo-targeting.

Keyword Targeting

You can use keyword targeting to display an ad in email that matches certain keywords. See the example email ad tag with keyword targeting

Passing Data to Landing Page

You can use the pass-along parameters to forward custom data from your email campaign to the landing page when a person click on the ad in the email. For example: https://example.com/landing.page?mode=YourCustomValue