State Call Presentation and Tutorial – Flashtalking

Creating a State Call in the Flashtalking API – August 2017

One of my responsibilities at Flashtlaking was to dig into some less used parts of the API and make them easier to utilize by surfacing a typical workflow and documenting necessary details to make the experience less daunting. When you don’t use something regularly and don’t have friendly documentation that tells a good story of its workflow – you typically don’t want to be the point person supporting this effort. My job was to figure out what that workflow would be and tell a compelling story of how and when you would want to use it. The State Call was one of those things.

Occasionally a client would need to track more detailed information from an ad, like if it were using some kind of geo-targeting to pass along a users zip code or general location. Or maybe we wanted to track what SKU product numbers were visible in a carousel and which item was clicked on by a user. In order to do this, we had to log that data as a string to a service that would pick it up and parse it into a report.

It was vital that the string and the actions were very specific and well tested before rolling it out live. Also, it was hard to test this without getting multiple team members involved (who often didn’t have the time), so any and all testing before bringing them in was imperative.

In the presentation notes and video below, I cover the details of this setup and how to test without being scared of this whole process. My job was to make this type of thing feel achievable by anyone.

https://www.evernote.com/l/AALnraDrycNNtoAeQTk-gC4RiQA-4WPh-P0