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All about marketing engineering. From building React apps to using the API of your favourite adserver.

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 [https://www.themarketingtechnologist.co/the-history-and-future-of-display-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

Using AWS Lambda and Slack to have fun while saving on EMR costs

Using AWS Lambda and Slack to have fun while saving on EMR costs

We all have these times where we hack a piece of code together in 5 minutes. Usually, these pieces of code are not hidden gems, they tend to do simple stuff. Every once in a while though, you will find yourself writing a simple script which gives you a big

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 [https://www.themarketingtechnologist.co/the-ceddl-a-data-layer-standard-that-never-was], 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

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 [https://www.themarketingtechnologist.co/passing-query-string-parameters-to-creatives-in-appnexus/], reading user context information like state and device type and to do some advanced

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

Moving API requests in React to Redux-Saga’s

reactjs Featured

Moving API requests in React to Redux-Saga’s

In the last year we, at Greenhouse Group [http://www.greenhousegroup.com/], have developed several React-based applications. One of the latest projects I’m working on is an internal tool to monitor marketing expenses for the marketeers within our company. It was my responsibility to set up this new tool

About debugging: 8 things I wish I knew earlier in my career

About debugging: 8 things I wish I knew earlier in my career

Being a developer for over 20 years I realized that when a started I saw debugging not as a craft on which I could improve but as a tedious factory job that sadly you need to do when you're a developer. And nobody wants to do dull work, so as

Daily Standups don’t have to suck!

Daily Standups don’t have to suck!

Agile working, Scrum, Daily Standups. There I’ve almost got a row on the Recruiter Bingo card. But seriously, I’ve worked at several companies [https://www.linkedin.com/in/marsbergen] in the last couple of years and I’ve been doing daily standups for more than 5 years now.

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

Personalized offline ads - Part 1: Recognizing people

Personalized offline ads - Part 1: Recognizing people

Online ads are getting more and more personalized. To a large degree, this is made possible because of the huge amounts of data gathered online. Using this data, smart algorithms are able to tailor ads to a specific person's interests and needs. What if we would be able to personalize

Helping our new Data Scientists start in Python: A guide to learning by doing

Helping our new Data Scientists start in Python: A guide to learning by doing

The Data Science team at Greenhouse Group is steadily growing and continuously changing. This also implies new Data Scientists and interns starting regularly. Each new Data Scientist we hire is unique and has a different set of skills. What they all have in common though is a strong analytical background

Api.ai vs Wit.ai (or is it Google vs Facebook?)

Api.ai vs Wit.ai (or is it Google vs Facebook?)

Yesterday’s big news in the world of chatbots was Google acquiring Api.ai [https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/google-acquires-api-ai-a-company-helping-developers-build-bots-that-arent-awful-to-talk-to/] , a company which allows developers to integrate natural language processing and understanding into their applications. Think of it like talking to someone, but instead, that someone is now your

How to set up ESLint with Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide in WebStorm

How to set up ESLint with Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide in WebStorm

Last year, Gaya wrote an incredibly useful article about how to get Airbnb's JavaScript Style Guide working in WebStorm [https://www.themarketingtechnologist.co/how-to-get-airbnbs-javascript-code-style-working-in-webstorm/]. However, JSCS has joined [https://medium.com/@markelog/jscs-end-of-the-line-bc9bf0b3fdb2#ece0] ESLint quite a while ago. We still want our code to validate through Airbnb's JS style

How to write a basic viewability tracker

How to write a basic viewability tracker

Although viewability is not always a guarantee for success [https://www.themarketingtechnologist.co/viewability-does-not-guarantee-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

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 [https://www.whatsapp.com/] 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

Send Slack notifications whenever a Pokémon spawns nearby using a Pokémon GO SlackBot

Send Slack notifications whenever a Pokémon spawns nearby using a Pokémon GO SlackBot

CURRENT STATUS (04/08/2016): Niantic seems to have made some big changes to the API last night, so currently all API scripts (including PoGoMap and bots) seem to be down. Feel free to share any fixes if you come across anything that could be of help. Meanwhile, I hope

Change your website's address bar or device status bar to match your brand colors

Since Chrome version 39 it is possible to have your website's address bar in a custom color instead of the default 'Seattle Gray' color. Use the following meta tag in your head section and change the color to your choice. With this setting your website has a subtle effect moving

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 explicit and

Upload your local Spark script to an AWS EMR cluster using a simple Python script

Upload your local Spark script to an AWS EMR cluster using a simple Python script

Apache Spark [http://spark.apache.org/] is definitely one of the hottest topics in the Data Science community at the moment. Last month when we visited PyData Amsterdam 2016 [http://pydata.org/amsterdam2016/] we witnessed a great example of Spark's immense popularity. The speakers at PyData talking about Spark had

Virtual reality: connecting Unity to the CAVE

Virtual reality: connecting Unity to the CAVE

Imagine being given the opportunity to experience a life-like virtual environment together with your peers just by using technology. Imagine seeing things you have not pictured possible, like visiting an alien planet, exploring the deepest parts of the ocean or even using it for teaching young children. As the technology

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

Smart clothing makes it feel real

This post is about the Smart Clothing Project of Greenhouse Group Labs [http://www.greenhousegroup.com/labs]. Labs is an ideal opportunity for Greenhouse Group to test technology before it has fully matured. The Lab is run by students from tech universities. What is smart clothing? Smart clothing is clothing