Launch of adcenter at DaWanda

Just yesterday, we launched a new adcenter at DaWanda: http://de.dawanda.com/adcenter

It constists of two tools:

(1) Homepage tool: this enables sellers, to book an ads on the DaWanda homepage to promote their DaWanda shops. Its a fix format, they pay 15 EUR for a duration of 7 days.

(2) Logenplatz tool: this enables sellers, to book featured placements on top of the site for selected products. Its CPM based. So sellers can book packages of impressions from 2.000 - 50.000 so far. For each campaign, they can select up to 50 products they would like to promote.  The ads are delivered by an internal ad server, that matches the ads to relevant search or browse events. CPM is 2,50 EUR. If you book more than 5.000 impressions, you get a discount.

We underestimated the effort for these tool by far. Especially the ad server was a tricky thing, because the ad delivery is determined by a large number of factors: is the product still valid, did the seller change the category, is the campaign still on budget, is the ad paused by the seller etc.

While the GUI was proceeding quite fast, the adserver took us more than 12 developer days. Because we had only one developer with ad server skills, the GUI team had to wait almost two weeks, before they could finish their job.

Testing took us also longer than anticipated, because several bugs needed further tweaks on the ad server - which took some time.

In the sprint planning meeting we did not expect the ad server to be so sophisticated. So if you do any adserver development, plan carefully and add 50% more time.