Forums / General / Delivering ads, ad management

Delivering ads, ad management

Author Message

Piotrek Karaś

Tuesday 18 March 2008 12:17:51 am

Hi,

I've just discovered that there are very few discussions or other resources for that matter, that are concerned with delivering advertisements with an eZ Publish installation. This would mean that either this is not an issue (it's simple enough) and/or that very few people deal with "ad-driven" sites. Actually, the latter would be surprising, if we take the eZ's media clients focus into account.

It would be great if you could share some of your experiences or thoughts on this.

For example:
- How do you serve your ads? (as content, with eZ Flow, with ad server integrations, other...)
- How do you deliver contextual ads?
- How do you deal with zone inheritance (so that a node and all/selected of its sub items have the same ad)?
- What are your clients' usual expectations?

Hope we can put some information together in this topic.

Thanks,
Piotrek

--
Company: mediaSELF Sp. z o.o., http://www.mediaself.pl
eZ references: http://ez.no/partners/worldwide_partners/mediaself
eZ certified developer: http://ez.no/certification/verify/272585
eZ blog: http://ez.ryba.eu

André R.

Tuesday 18 March 2008 2:24:46 am

I can only talk about the projects I have worked on.

One large eZ Publish user has a custom made tag system to tag nodes or subtrees for ads, ads are delivered by external server with javascript tags in the page layout.

On most newspaper sites, they use some sort of ad server that uses javascript tags in the page layout.

I have worked on a site that used phpads, but because of performance issues they had to change it out for something else. I have not tested newer version however (openads).

http://ez.no/developer/contribs/3rd_party/extension_phpadsnew_pubsvn
http://ez.no/developer/contribs/template_plugins/openads_2_3_max_media_manager_template_plugin

eZ Online Editor 5: http://projects.ez.no/ezoe || eZJSCore (Ajax): http://projects.ez.no/ezjscore || eZ Publish EE http://ez.no/eZPublish/eZ-Publish-Enterprise-Subscription
@: http://twitter.com/andrerom

Piotrek Karaś

Tuesday 18 March 2008 5:18:54 am

<i>On most newspaper sites, they use some sort of ad server that uses javascript tags in the page layout.</i>

Any examples? URLs?

--
Company: mediaSELF Sp. z o.o., http://www.mediaself.pl
eZ references: http://ez.no/partners/worldwide_partners/mediaself
eZ certified developer: http://ez.no/certification/verify/272585
eZ blog: http://ez.ryba.eu

Mark Marsiglio

Tuesday 18 March 2008 6:44:35 am

We have used this plugin on a few sites. It is a fairly capable, if not a bit complex, open source ad server. They have upgraded the ad server software since this extension.

http://ez.no/developer/contribs/template_plugins/openads_2_3_max_media_manager_template_plugin

http://www.thinkcreative.com
Turning Ideas Into Strategic Solutions

Piotrek Karaś

Tuesday 18 March 2008 10:31:34 pm

Hello Mark,

Yes, I do know this ad server. I've also just analyzed the extension - it simply calls ad zones from within the ad server. I'm little more interested in the eZ side, though. How would use that - fixed operator calls in the templates or as a tag in XMLBlock?

Have you guys had to deal with a situation, when a client wants to manage a particular advertisement location (lets say the main billboard) in a advanced way, for example to assign his campaigns to selected areas of the site (for example: home page, one particular category of articles and the registration page)?

Thanks,
Piotrek

--
Company: mediaSELF Sp. z o.o., http://www.mediaself.pl
eZ references: http://ez.no/partners/worldwide_partners/mediaself
eZ certified developer: http://ez.no/certification/verify/272585
eZ blog: http://ez.ryba.eu

Mark Marsiglio

Wednesday 19 March 2008 5:29:17 am

Yes - we have a current installation which uses an external ad server similar to OpenAds (but a hosted system) and we control the placement of the ads through a new class called Ad Tag.

The class includes only a memo and the tag code, and then our templates look for that object and assign the tag in the JS for the ad zones. We treat it as a cascade, so it picks up the ad tag and applies to to the object and all of its subitems in the tree. If they add another ad tag in a subsection, it overrides the default one placed under the home page.

The zones are fixed (leaderboard, skyscraper, etc) but the content of those zones is specified by the tags specified by the client.

This is the code we use in pagelayout:

{def $start_node = first_set($DesignKeys:used.node, 2)}

{let checkarray=fetch( 'content', 'node', hash( 'node_id', $start_node )).path_array|reverse
     ad_tag_nodes=array()
}


{foreach $checkarray as $thisnodeinpathid}

	{set ad_tag_nodes = fetch('content', 'list', hash('parent_node_id', $thisnodeinpathid, class_filter_type, 'include', class_filter_array, array('ad_tag')))}

	{if $ad_tag_nodes|count}
	{break}
	{/if}

{/foreach}

{if $ad_tag_nodes|count}

<!-- BEGIN RICH-MEDIA ADCONDUCTOR CODE -->
<script language="JavaScript">
rnum=Math.round(Math.random() * 100000);
document.write('<SCR'+'IPT SRC="http://ads.addesktop.com/cgi-bin/ads/ad{$ad_tag_nodes[0].name|trim|wash}.cgi/RS={$ad_tag_nodes[0].data_map.size_string.content|trim|wash}/KW={cond($ad_tag_nodes[0].data_map.keywords.has_content,$ad_tag_nodes[0].data_map.keywords.content.keyword_string|wash,'KEYWORD')}/V=3.0R/'+rnum+'/CNW/RETURN-CODE/"></SCR'+'IPT>');
</script>
<!-- END ADCONDUCTOR CODE -->

{/if}

{/let}

http://www.thinkcreative.com
Turning Ideas Into Strategic Solutions