Siebe Hiemstra

35 posts published

Track in-app ad viewability with(out) MRAID

Track in-app ad viewability with(out) MRAID

In an earlier post, I wrote about the the history and future of ad viewability tech, how viewability and its companion exposure time are becoming more and more default metrics and measurements for online media campaigns and why I think the future of viewability measurement is looking bright. Although there

Read data from an Angular app from outside

Read data from an Angular app from outside

Although data layers are becoming more and more mainstream, quite often we still run into sites that do not have any kind of data layer available, forcing us to execute some funky tricks to get to the data we need for our web analytics and DCO projects. And these funky

Working with Creative Macros in AppNexus hosted creatives

Working with Creative Macros in AppNexus hosted creatives

As a creative developer, one of the best features of AppNexus is their huge number of creative macros. We use those macros for quite some purposes, like reading query string parameters, reading user context information like state and device type and to do some advanced click tag magic. Their creative

The history and future of ad viewability tech

The history and future of ad viewability tech

Viewability and its companion exposure time are becoming more and more default metrics and measurements for online media campaigns. But ever since, I've heard quite some times that the measurement of viewability is a real pain in the ass, and a pain in the ass for multiple reasons. Sometimes it

Pause your Adwords campaigns automatically when a site is down with an Adwords script

Pause your Adwords campaigns automatically when a site is down with an Adwords script

When working in the field of SEA, one of your main goals is to get people to click on your ads. But what if the website is down, or not working properly because of a technical issue? That's a waste of that CPC, right? At Greenhouse Group we monitor all

How to write a basic viewability tracker

How to write a basic viewability tracker

Although viewability is not always a guarantee for success, it's a hot topic in the land of online marketing. We do not only track viewability in our display campaigns to optimise the exposure time of our campaigns, but we also use viewability to see how visitors are using our client's

How to start a WhatsApp conversation directly from the web

How to start a WhatsApp conversation directly from the web

Did you know you can send a WhatsApp message directly from a web page? You might have already seen this elsewhere because AddThis also offers it in their well-known and well-spread sharing tools. As an online marketing agency, we can also leverage the power of WhatsApp by integrating it in

Passing data to and from a nested component in Angular 2

Passing data to and from a nested component in Angular 2

Angular decided to drop the '@', '&' and '=' in version 2.0. If you don't know what they do: good for you! To me, the @&= concept was among Angular 1's worst choices. Luckily, in Angular 2 the communication between components is a lot more

How and why to test your product's performance on a slow internet connection

How and why to test your product's performance on a slow internet connection

Most of the time, we're blessed with a fast 4G, WiFi or wired internet connection, and everything is just fine. But how do our tools perform when the internet connection is not that great? Some time ago, a client sent me a screenshot of one of their creatives looking terribly

Introduction to data binding in Angular 2 versus Angular 1

Introduction to data binding in Angular 2 versus Angular 1

Data binding, one of the most loved and hated concepts of Angular 1, made its way to Angular 2. There are a couple of ways to bind data in Angular: interpolation, one way binding (unidirectional), two-way binding and event binding. These four types of data binding were already available in

Passing query string parameters to a creative in Appnexus

Passing query string parameters to a creative in Appnexus

After years of experience in performance marketing, we can state that it's often true that the deeper a user lands in a funnel, the higher the chance they will convert. When building a banner ad, the banner should ideally be prefilled with as much information possible. This is something we

Create a simple toggle button using reactive programming

Create a simple toggle button using reactive programming

I'm pretty familiar with asynchronous programming with callbacks and, more recently, Promises, but I've only started playing around with reactive programming a few weeks ago. More and more people seem to be talking about it, and it looks like the concept will be available in ES7 in some form as

Looking back at a fantastic first year: Most read articles in 2015

Looking back at a fantastic first year: Most read articles in 2015

In May 2015, we started this blog as Blue Mango Geek. Our belief? When you're writing a coworker an email longer than one paragraph, you should consider blogging about it. Share it with the rest of the company and the whole world! We decided to write about the things we

Creating dynamic videos using JavaScript and After Effects: the basics

Creating dynamic videos using JavaScript and After Effects: the basics

In digital marketing, there is a lot of buzz around dynamic videos. You may have noticed all the start-ups popping up in this scene. Dynamic is nothing new in the world of display advertising. We already see a lot of dynamic ads for retargeting by big parties like Criteo, but

A moving object in your campaign? Update Adwords accordingly every hour.

A moving object in your campaign? Update Adwords accordingly every hour.

We are running a campaign for one of our clients that is about a fluffy heart with GPS hardware that is travelling through the country. It looks something like this: We'll get deeper into this campaign in another post on The Marketing Technologist, but for now it's enough to know

Huh? Does DCM use the creative's source code for its validation?

We serve most of our ads using Appnexus, but now and then we need to use a different adserver. Recently we wanted to upload our creative to Google's DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM), part of the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. DCM has quite a lot of requirements for the creatives that

React Router: a comprehensive introduction

When you need to route between different parts of your React application, you'll probably need a router. The most popular choice to do this in React is React Router. If you are familiar with routing in Ember, you'll get your routing up and running with React Router in no time.

Catch React errors and log them to Sentry

We use the amazing Sentry tool to track both our frontend and backend errors. It's pretty straighforward to setup Sentry for code that runs in the browser, and it captures all uncatched errors out of the box: Raven.config('[our key]', { collectWindowErrors: true, fetchContext: true, linesOfContext: 40 }).install(

Force Express to handle all requests over HTTPS

If your Express-powered Node app sends user information over the wire it's recommended to use a secure connection. Because of this you might want to force all your requests to run over https, even when someone explicitly opens your app using http. Luckily this is pretty easy using a Express

Creating a SHA-2 encrypted certificate signing request for Heroku

The other day we needed to purchase a SSL certificate for one of our Heroku apps to ensure all information is transmitted securely. Luckily there is SSL Endpoint, which is a paid add-on service to get your certificate up and running on Heroku. Also, they have a pretty nice guide

IE8 is no longer worth our client's money

I have always been convinced we should stop blaming Internet Explorer and make sure everyone on the web can at least use the bare minimum of our products and see our ads using graceful degredation. But there are limits. The discussion whether one should support Internet Explorer 8 may be

How npm 3 solves WebStorm's performance issues

WebStorm is our IDE of choice and we love it. It's brilliant. This blog's title might be a bit of a hyperbole, but WebStorm has a serious issue. There is one big fuckup and that is the way WebStorm indexes stuff. With version 10 the indexing process improved already, but