Revive custom/dynamic data collection

[DonRickler]

Hi Everyone,

I've been trawling the forums for a while looking for the answer to my question and haven't found an exact answer so thought I would ask my specific question.

I am using Revive in an Ad network capacity. 

We began serving our ads through a DSP (demand-side platform) recently and have been investigating how we can maximise data collection. For example, the DSP we are using makes may use the macro {device_id} to collect device id's from when the ad is served.

With other ad servers, there are pre-determined key value pairs/macros for information collection. A typical example might be that an expression such as $_variable1 can be used to collect any data in the ad code i.e $_variable1={device_id}. Thus enabling the dynamic collection of the device id via {device_id} under the $_variable1 field.

I have seen the blackriver.to magic macros list where there is no obvious (to me) workaround. However, this type of data collection is pretty common in media buying and OpenX being an SSP I would find it odd that this was not built into Revive in its earlier guise.

So my question is this: Does Revive have any basic methods for the collection of dynamic variables? If so, what are they? If not, does anyone have any tips/tricks/workarounds/plugins that can enable this?

If I have not been clear, let me know and I will try to rephrase.

Thanks in advance!

[andrewatfornax]

Hi @DonRickler,

No, as far as I know, Revive Adserver doesn't support dynamic variable names.

That said, you can essentially pass in any variable name/value pair combination to Revive Adserver that you want, via the invocation tags - Revive Adserver will let you do that, so, you can dynamically generate both the name and the value of a variable pair, if you want to.

It's just that when that variable information arrives in to the ad serving code, you can only make decisions about things like what banner to deliver based on what's set up. So, you will have set up expectations around one or more variable names - and those names can't change dynamically based on the context of the banner.

Does that help? 

[DonRickler]

Thanks for the response Andrew very helpful indeed.

I don't need to serve the ad based on rules currently, but do need to collect information dynamically.

So I'm interested to see an example of how one might go about doing the above? Could you help? Let's use this variable as an example: {variable1}

Edited February 28, 2018 by DonRickler

[andrewatfornax]

I knew you were going to ask that @DonRickler, and of course, it's the Site - Variable delivery rule that you want to use, which is one of the documentation tasks that I have on my todo list... https://documentation.revive-adserver.com/display/DOCS/Site+Delivery+Rules

Have a poke around the forums or on the web, I know others have done good write ups of how to do this...