Account balance limits
A broker or business owner may set default account balance limits for pre-pay and post-pay customers. The pre-pay customer balance limit is normally set to zero while the post-pay balance limit is typically large.
Account limits may also be set for individual advertiser accounts. Publisher accounts do not have balance limits.
Account activation
Advertiser accounts may be de-activated by users with the appropriate permission levels. Typically this would be a broker or account manager.
User roles and activities
The system has a configurable role-permission setting mechanism that supports a range of users, ranging from brokers with advertising businesses to self-service advertisers and publishers. Brokers can develop products for use by advertisers using a flexible template model. Advertisers (or ad agencies) provide advertising content and plan campaigns, while publishers display the advertising products with content on their sites.
Advertisers may manage their own accounts as self-service users. Full service accounts may be managed by an advertising agency or broker on behalf of multiple clients.
The following administrative functions may be performed by users with appropriate permissions:
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Account management functions
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Manual transactions
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Campaign and product settings
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Product creation
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Keyword minimum bid values
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Click fraud management
Home folder access
Users such as account managers and help desk are able to enter the home folders of other users to enable them to solve problems and perform management tasks. This activity is also known as "masquerading".
All actions performed while masquerading are recorded in audit logs. The user is recorded as the masqueraded user.
All aspects of the masqueraded user's environment are visible to the masquerading (administrative) user, including the contents of product tabs, timezones, currencies, languages and UI configuration details.
The masquerading (admin) user will be able to perform administrative functions that the masqueraded user does not have access to.
Customizing the system
The Cxense Advertising user interface is customizable to suit the branding requirements of a broker or agency, and system functionality may be enhanced by the use of plug-ins, including ranking models that support specific advertising paradigms or business models.
The user interface may be customized to enable new features to be exposed to end users. Language availability is determined at system level.
Configuration settings may be used to customize the following items:
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Countries and address formats
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Locations
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Languages
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CPC floor price (brokers)
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PDF and email templates
Folder hierarchy
All Advertising user accounts and items that relate to those accounts are stored in a folder hierarchy.
User accounts are located under a broker folder and all items related to user activities such as campaigns, ads, adspaces etc are located at various locations in the folder hierarchy.
User roles and permissions are related to the folder hierarchy. See the Roles and permissions section for more information.
Broker nodes
A broker node is normally found at the head of a sub-tree in the folder hierarchy in which a set of advertisers and publishers is located. There may be many different broker nodes in the installation.
Certain configuration items are also located at the broker node, including
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Available currencies and exchange rates
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User interface languages, customization and styling
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Payment gateways
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Locations
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Products related to this broker
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Role and security details
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Email and PDF templates
Configuration items may also be found at other locations in the folder hierarchy - including look and feel configuration for an advertising agency.
User nodes
Users are associated with a user home folder at appropriate points in the folder hierarchy, below a broker node. Parts of the folder structure in the hierarchy may be shared - for example, in the case of advertisers from the same advertising agency.
Blocking options
Various mechanisms are available to permit advertisers to prevent ads from showing in specific publisher domains, disallow fraudulent clicks and block traffic to or from subdomains or IP addresses.
Click fraud
cX ad provides several options to help combat click fraud, including
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A cryptographically secure chain form impression to click to prevent scripting of impressions and clicks. Click URLs must be served by the AdServer
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A minimum time between impression and click is enforced to reduce the impact of robots and auto-clickers
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Duplicate clicks for the same impression are prevented by the use of click tokens
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IP ranges may be blocked by a business owner
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User agents, robots and crawlers may be blocked
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Advertisers and publishers may block subdomains
Policies for dealing with click fraud are the responsibility of a broker. When clicks are shown to be fraudulent, a broker may disallow the related revenue from being credited to the publisher's account.
Inventory management
Users with the appropriate permission levels may
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Activate or de-activate campaigns
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Set campaign priorities - see Campaign Priorities in Campaigns.
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Create and manage products (business owners)
Minimum bids for keywords
Minimum bid values for keywords in a specific language may be defined for a product. This value is normally set to a value higher than the broker's minimum bid value.
The minimum bid value may be entered in any available configured currency - by default, this is the broker's default currency.
Lemmatization and variant normalization is performed during keyword matching to ensure that the appropriate forms of the purchased keywords and processed.
Transaction management
Business owners are able to view all financial transactions relating to their customers (advertisers and publishers).
They may
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List payments for reconciliation with payment gateway records
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Verify payment success or failure (and failure reason) for specific customers
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List transactions for a time period to review overall financial performance
Filtering criteria such as transaction type, payment status, payment reference number, date range and account name may be applied.
Manual transactions
Manual transactions may be created to debit or credit billing or earning accounts. All manual transactions appear on financial statements and billing history records.