Publishers Revisited - Administration

Let me explain some of the additional features of the "Publishers and zones" and "Advertisers and campaigns" modules that I had to skip earlier for lack of time and space.

Log on to the phpAdsNew administration module with your "administrator" credentials. Navigate to the "Inventory" section and click on the "Add new publisher" option.

This time, I would like to highlight the different security privileges that you can assign to a   "publisher." For example, it is possible that you may hire someone to manage the show while you are busy vacationing in the Bahamas with the fortunes you've earned from the website. The options that you see in the screen shot, above, will allow you to define the privileges that this new publisher enjoys when accessing the phpAdsNew administration module.

Next, you must define a "zone" for the publisher. Here, let’s select the "IAB Leader Board" banner type, in order to keep things different from the first part. If you’re not already aware, this banner type displays a horizontal banner across the page, as is evident from the associated dimensions. 

Here is a quick overview of the other types of "zones" that you can create in phpAdsNew:

• Banner, Button, Rectangle: this widely-used banner type allows you to display JPEG or GIF images or Flash SWF movies.
  
  
• Interstitial or Floating DHTML: these allow you to display dynamic ads that move around the screen when a visitor accesses your website.
  
  
• Pop-Up: as the name suggests, this option will load the banner in a new pop-up window whenever visitors access your website(s). They may not like it, but then - as they say - there is no such thing as a free lunch!
  
  
• Text-ad: this format allows advertisers to display text information about their product (or services); it also allows for better targeting of audiences when integrated with search engines, as seen by the tremendous popularity of the Google AdSense program.

One important point to keep in mind before defining your banner types: each is associated with a different "invocation code." So, if you decide to change your banner type later, you need to update your code accordingly. This is a painful exercise if the website consists of tons of static HTML pages. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Coming back to phpAdsNew: for each zone that you’ve created, you can tweak its "Advanced" settings to configure another "zone" (or "banner") that the tool should display when there are no more "AdViews" associated with the current zone. The general norm is to define a default zone - as I showed you in the first part - with unlimited "AdViews" so that phpAdsNew can continue to serve banners seamlessly!

On this screen, you can specify whether you want to append another banner to the current one; just review the options in the drop down to view a list of banner types that you can play around with.

The "Linked banners" tab allows you to select the "campaigns," if they have already been added, that you wish to use with the current zone. I bet you already knew that -- but you might not have been aware of the other two options, highlighted below:

The first "Banner selection" option allows you to select a particular set of banners from all active "campaigns" that match the banner type for the current zone. Alternatively, you could also specify a list of keywords. phpAdsNew compares these keywords with those associated with individual banners, and displays the ones that match the input criteria. This allows you, as a publisher, to display content-specific banners, thereby increasing the probability of "click-throughs."

As the names suggests, the "Probability" option allows you to do just that -- view the "probability" that a particular banner will displayed for a particular zone. I'll discuss this further in the following section.

Finally, we have the "InvocationCode" section. You’ve already seen how to generate the code for local invocation in the first part. But, we cannot use this mechanism this time around for obvious reasons. So what’s the solution? Hang on; all will be revealed in due course.

Before I move to the next section, here's one final tip. You can view a list of all "zones" for a particular publisher by clicking on the "Overview" option, displayed alongside each publisher in the "Publishers & zones" sub-section.

This screen gives you quick access to all the options discussed above; it's just one of those little things that makes the GUI of phpAdsNew, a breeze to use!