This time we’ve focused on 4 different areas:

• Creation of banner-campaigns - which now includes ‘expandable banners’!
• Maintenance and updates
• Google API integration
• General functionality

Without doubt the most anticipated feature is the availability of expandable banners. We’ve strived to make creation of expandable campaigns as easy as possible. Hence, you should feel comfortable in setting up these campaigns from the start.

Another apparent change is that maintenance news is now placed right beside user logon to inform you of future updates.

Furthermore our API has been improved to integrate with Google’s new version 12.

In addition to these major improvements general functionality from media-planning to drill-downs has been updated.

As usual more information is available on our wiki.

A new and very important feature is ‘Scheduled Reports’. From now on it is possible to order individually, customized reports in order to make your marketing even more focused. Just fill out the form under ‘Marketing Performance’ and we will get back to you.

Another big step forward is our new export of data function. Charts and views are now easily exportable to Excel, Word or PowerPoint without encoding. This means that what you see in Headlight is what you get in Excel.

In addition to this we have implemented a new print-feature. On every screen in Headlight you will now find a print button for instant print-outs.

Furthermore, users will experience a significant improvement from log-on to sign-out as a massive effort has been made to address app. 30 areas in general work-flow.

But no more small talk… The update includes more than 40 bug fixes, and the highlights are as follows:

- The backup banners are now displayed in Headlight when a Flash banner campaign is edited or created.
- The “Test banner campaign” functionality has been made more user friendly.
- The image preview functionality has been improved to better handle file names containing special characters, etc.
- Goal Charts and KPI charts no longer display data from dates not included in the selected time period.
- Using the “Compare by label” functionality no longer prevents further drilldowns.
- Advanced banner campaigns can now be deleted without errors.
- In the automated e-mail flow, the recognition of links in HTML e-mails has been vastly improved.
- The selected dates are no longer reset when the period selector is reopened after choosing a custom period.
- The label is now always retained correctly when a previously labelled activity is edited at a later time.

The syntax for flash banners should be exactly the same as before.

The outcome of this will be new features that we will launch during the next few months.

The first feature has already been launched secretly this week and was perhaps the most wanted request in Headlight: Faster updates on adserving.

From now on you will get updates on the number of impressions every four hours. This will usually mean that as soon as you log into Headlight on day with new campaign activities you will be able to tell instantly if they are displayed or not.

A lot of people have asked us for jpg-support; it’s now here!

Also testing has become better: We have changed the logic a bit so you will be able to start testing your banner campaigns immediately regardless of the start date you’ve entered in Headlight. We are convinced this will make your adserving life a lot easier.

This can best be illustrated by creating a small test CSV like this:

When opening this in Excel, we get a beautiful representation like this:

All is good, life is lovely. Until you decide to rename the first column from MyID to just ID:

Then Excel gets nasty, and starts yelling at you:

There are two ways to get around this Excel error, either you just don’t call your first column ID, or you save the CSV as UTF-8 instead of ANSI, but then you might have some problems with correct encoding of local characters. Good going Microsoft.

I noticed during this week that actually using specific add ons for Firefox (and probably also other browsers) you can click on the display URL.

The obvious problem to advertisers is that using the “headline link” gives you the ability to track everything (using whatever marketing tool), but the other one… well a click on that link wouldn’t track anything, since it’s basically a click on something that isn’t a link. Jikes!

It’s great stuff, so check out the wiki video whenever you have the time.

As we are still working on the wiki, please send us comments if you disagree with the way it’s done or would like videos on other topics.