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DCO

What is DCO?

DCO or Dynamic Creative Optimisation is a feature that allows for dynamically fetching and updating pieces of a banner.

For example, we have a banner for a product on sale:

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This banner can consist of multiple parts:

  • Title
  • Product description
  • Order button
  • CTA
  • Pricing information
  • Special offer information
  • Product Image(s)
  • Company Image

In a regular banner, if any of the parts of the banner would need to be changed, it would need to be done manually. Either by making a new banner or by going to the creative and updating the banner by hand.

With DCO, these fields can be connected to a feed, which can update the fields automatically. For example. The price of the product is changed. This changed is put in the feed, which changes the banner automatically.

If the title of the advertisement is changed, this can also be changed via the feed without manual intervention.

Changes can also be made based on contextual or audience information. Let’s say we have a user who sees this banner in Europe. They have no need for American based financing options. Since we know this user comes from a European country, we can also automatically update the banner he sees with information from the feed:

A simple example of DCO is the automatic rotation of multiple product banners on a single position, creating a product carousel:

DCO is thus used for changing the content of a banner based on context, audience and up-to-date product information. This allows for dynamically creating and delivering personalised ad creatives in real time by automatically assembling and updating different parts of banners such as images, headlines, calls to action, etc…

This can significantly reduce the workload for adops by reducing the amount of manual actions needed for keeping banners up-to-date, and by reducing the amount of banners that need to be set up in the first place.

Targeting can also be taken into account. If a user has shown interest in a certain product category, banners can be assembled by the feed based on the relevant product category even if the user is looking at other products (given that the user has granted consent or is logged in). This way all products and information can be bundled in one feed and shown to the user based on known audience information or, if this is lacking, contextual page information.

Furthermore, feeds can even take external information into account. If you want to show a banner promoting barbecue material in the summer, but only when it’s at least relatively sunny, you can connect the feed to a weather service and only show BBQ related banners when the conditions are right.

Store information such as location and stock can also be connected into the feed, making sure that no products are shown that aren’t available at a particular store.

How does DCO work?

A DCO setup consists of two parts:

  • One or more product feeds
  • An HTML5 or an Advar creative

The feed is administered by the advertiser, either with a custom feed that is synced to Adhese locally every time the feed is updated or with files hosted directly on Adhese.

When someone visits a site with inventory connected to a DCO campaign, Our CDN system will show banners based on the up-to-date banner information synced from the advertisers feed.

To give an example setup related to the feed shown above, we have three items in a Product Feed format:

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These creatives are defined by an advar template containing things like the image, CTA, Price, etc...

Schermafdruk_20250822_113946.png

In a second campaign we have a product carousel creative that links to these three feed items:

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If you want to implement a DCO banner either on Adhese or on your own CDN, please contact support.

Reporting

The default reporting on campaign, booking and creative level is available in Adhese as always.
For more granular reporting on DCO banners, custom reporting with custom trackers can be set up with BQ/Lookerstudio, where we can take into account information such as:

  • Product ID
  • Pricing
  • Codes
  • Etc…