Managing your existing / self-service campaigns

With MANTIS, you can manage existing ad campaigns that you have already sold direct.

For example, let's say you have a handful of existing advertisers that you already have contracts with, but you also want to try out MANTIS to see if you can make more money by tapping into our network as well as selling on your own inventory. This strategy makes a lot of sense, and we have built support for you to do just that. To set up your direct ad campaigns through the MANTIS platform, follow these steps:

Step 1: Navigate to your Campaigns tab 

Log in to your Admin area and click the tab on the left hand side labeled "Campaigns." This is the section in your control panel that allows you to create new and manage all existing ad campaigns that you've sold direct.

Step 2: Create a new campaign

Now that you have navigated to your "Campaigns" tab, you'll notice a blue button in the top right hand side of your screen labeled "Create." Click this button to create a new self-service campaign that you wish to manage through the MANTIS ad platform.

Step 3: Control how each direct campaign should display

Setting a total click or impression count

With MANTIS, you can control how each direct campaign is displayed on an individual basis. For example, if you have sold an advertiser direct on a total amount of clicks or impressions a campaign must generate before it is to be shut off, you can easily enter these maximums into the MANTIS system and the campaign will automatically pause once the maximums have been hit.

Setting a campaign start/end date

Most publishers choose to sell direct campaigns on a fixed monthly schedule as opposed to setting a total maximum click or impression total; to facilitate these types of ad sales with strict timelines, we've baked in the ability to control each direct campaign's start and end dates, making it easy to manage campaigns no matter when they were sold during the year.

Target direct campaigns to specific geographic regions, devices, and more

Selling an advertiser on a local campaign can be difficult to do on your own as a publisher. However, with MANTIS, we've built in this functionality for free and provide our publishing partners with the ability to target direct campaigns sold by you by country, state/region, and ZIP. Below is a screen shot of an example of the various options we provide via your "Campaigns" tab:

Campaign Rotation Priority

By default, any self-service campaign you create will rotate evenly among other campaigns on our network. If the agreement you have with the advertiser prevents such a rotation, or you feel that as the publisher you can earn more by showing more MANTIS ads, you should look into the options available under the Rotation Priority drop-down under each direct campaign.

You can alter the above behavior by changing the priority setting to show your campaign ahead of ones provided by our network, after all network campaigns, and more.

Rotate normally with network campaigns

NOTE: This is a legacy option and currently behaves the same as "Rotate with network campaigns at low priority".

Show ahead of all network campaigns

Normally, our network will rotate through each campaign at least once to ensure the user has seen all available ads. By choosing this option, you force your self-service campaign to ALWAYS show, even if it has been viewed once before (at the expense of serving paid ads from our network).

Rotate with network campaigns at high priority

Your self-service campaign will always show on the first page view of the user and not appear again until they have seen all other paid campaigns available on our network.

Rotate with network campaigns at low priority

Your self-service campaign will show only after the user has seen all paid campaigns available on our network.

Backfill as a last resort

Commonly used to serve "house ads" or "waterfall" tags from another network, these will only show if there are zero campaigns to display from either your self-service pool or our network. Even if a user has seen all other campaigns before, we will repeat them before ever showing a campaign marked as backfill.

Zone Reservation

When creating your zones, we provide an option called “Direct Targeting” which will require ads to explicitly target that location in order to be served (meaning campaigns provided by our network will never show). When creating self-service campaigns you must call out those zones for this functionality to work properly. Note: For maximum revenue potential, we strongly recommend publishers dedicate 1 or 2 internal ad zones for all direct campaigns to rotate "evenly" with MANTIS campaigns, in addition to another 2-3 ad zones dedicated to 100% MANTIS fill.