Best practices for large resellers using the adCenter API

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Resellers are businesses that handle adCenter accounts for hundreds or thousands of clients, usually small businesses. Resellers are also known as ?aggregators.? If you are developing systems using the API for one of these resellers, there are some best practices that you?ll want to keep in mind.

  • You should use the provided code samples in the MSDN adCenter API documentation for guidance.

  • As a rule of thumb, you should use the adCenter API sandbox for functional testing so your developers can become more familiar with the code and operations of the API.

  • However, the sandbox should not be used for full stress-testing.

  • adCenter APIs are in batch format. Use batches ? a common error is sending one entity at a time when the API can handle thousands. The API is optimized for batches and we recommend that you use the maximum batch size. That will optimize the number of calls you can make to adCenter, as well as how adCenter treats the data.

  • When batches are not sufficient, use multithreading for faster reporting or faster campaign management.

  • For reporting, the adCenter API handles 1,000 accounts at a time, meaning 1,000 account IDs. That can reduce the number of calls you will need to make.

  • When sending a batch, if 1 fails, all 1,000 fail. You can just drop the one failure and resend the batch.

  • There is a common misconception that you must wait for a full day to get valid data in reports. This is correct for some data, but not most.

    • adCenter strives for a rolling 3-hour window for log processing. For example, if a click happened at noon, we will do the processing on the data by 3 p.m.  This is not a hard deadline but the development team attempts to maintain this rate of processing.
    • For two types of data -- Age/Gender targeting data and Geotargeting data ? log processing occurs daily.
    • All other types of data are processed within the 3-hour window or as closely as possible. The data is immediately rolled into the daily, weekly, and yearly sums as well.

Let us know if you have any questions ? you can post in the comments or to our forums.