AdPlugg Scales!

AdPlugg has been growing like crazy. We now serve millions of ads every day and have thousands of customers who use the service. We’ve regularly been upgrading servers and our backend software to handle the increased load.

AdPlugg uses highly scalable cloud servers and CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to make this all possible.

In addition to more customers in general, we’ve also added a number of larger and more high profile accounts. This includes the websites of some well known magazines, radio stations, tv stations and newspapers. Some of the more well known ones include the Fiesta Bowl, Wine Enthusiast and the BC Heights (the Student newspaper of Boston College).

As well as scaling up our backend systems to handle the increased load, we just released a number of new enhancements to our front end Ad Manager that make the user interface easier to use for large sites and accounts with complex configurations and a large number of ads.

We’ve added the ability to scroll through the list of ads when choosing your ads for your charts and reports. This feature turns on when you have more than 10 ads so that the list is easier to navigate.

We’ve added the ability to sort, search and filter the Ad, Placement and Zone lists. In addition, we added additional columns to each of these lists so that you can see things like which Placement an Ad is targeted to without opening the Ad.

Sortable

Each list now has a number of sortable columns. The ones that are sortable have blue links in the header row at the top of the list. Simply click the header to sort the list by the entries in the column. Click the list again to sort the list in reverse order. Click the list a third time to stop sorting by the column. If the column is a text column, it will be sorted alphabetically. If it is a number column, it will be sorted in numerical order.

Searchable

The search allows you to enter in any text and the list will be restricted to entries that mach that text. The text that is matched could be from any of the columns.

Filterable

We’ve also added a number of filters for each list. The filters allow you to restrict the entries shown in the list to entries matching the specific filter. For instance you can filter the results to only show active or inactive ads. You can also use a filter to only show ads that target a particular Placement or Zone. This way you can quickly see just the ads that target your top bar for example.

These features were designed to make AdPlugg even easier to use. Have any ideas for other features that we could add or how we could make these features better? Please post them into the comments section below.