How to target ads to a specific browser
A client asked me how he can target an ad so that it will only be displayed when the site visitor is using a specific browser, in this case, Google Chrome. He wants to show a special ad for that situation.
The trick to this is to use a delivery limitation that looks at the “user agent string”, a piece of text that the browser sends along with every page or ad request, to uniquely identify the browser.
For Google Chrome version 10, this user agent string looks something like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.133 Safari/534.16
It tells the web server that’s handling the request about the operating system being used, the browser type, and so on.
What all Chrome browser versions have in common is that their user-agent strings contain the word ‘chrome’, which sets them apart from all other browsers on the market.
This can be used to target an ad in the Revolver Ad Project, like this:
Go to the banner you want to target to a specific browser Click on the “Delivery Options” tab for that banner From the “Add Delivery Limitations” select “Client – User-agent” and click the “Add” button In the entry fields that appear, change “is equal to” to “contains” and enter the word “chrome” in the text field below. Here is what the screen would look like:
Target an ad in Revolver Ad Project using the user agent of the visitor’s browser
Don’t forget to “Save changes” when you’re done.
To find the user agent of other browsers, you could review the website UserAgentString.com and the comprehensive lists of all user agents they have collected.
