Survive without Flash ads -Use HTML5 in DFP

Author: Rishabh Mishra Category: Help Topics 16 Sep 15

As we are aware the flash ads are no longer supported by the browsers, which has affected the campaigns and left the question mark for many advertisers and publishers on how to deal this situation. Most of the flash creatives are now being displayed with a play button. User has to click play button in order to see the ad which is not a good user experience. Well in order to solve this issue, only prominent way is to traffic your flash creatives as HTML5. There are couple of options available in order to convert the flash files into HTML5 like swiffy, Google Web Designer, Adobe Edge, etc.

Swiffy: Swiffy is an online tool for converting the flash creatives to HTML5. For the creatives with size less than 1MB, swiffy tool can be of great help. Please find steps below on how to convert and insert the clickTAG in HTML5 for proper tracking and redirecting:

Link to Swiffy
As simple as uploading your flash file, accept terms and condition and click on upload.
Click on View Conversion.
Copy the entire source code of html5 creative (converted flash).
In DFP, add custom creative and paste the entire code.

Important: In order to track clicks and redirect to the correct landing page, you need to add below line exactly before stage.start().

stage.setFlashVars(“clickTAG=%%CLICK_URL_ESC%%%%DEST_URL%%”);

Replace the %%DEST_URL%% with required landing page URL. Also note, flash creatives are case sensitive. You can find the correct clickTAG for your flash creative using http://www.adopstools.net/ or Flash Validator. You should change the variable case accordingly in the above URL. Otherwise your creative will not land to the correct landing page.

One can follow the above mentioned steps in order to have the flash creatives previewing normally. There is no update or news from Google on what needs to be done with the Flash creatives. There is no such guidelines on HTML5 creative or how it needs to be trafficked in DFP. IAB has general guides on their site ut nothing is officially released yet. We can expect some guidelines soon. One can look for updates on DoubleClick blog. Feel free to add your points or reach out directly if you have any questions.