Advert Management System

Many of our clients seek ways to monetise their websites through sales of targeted and monitored advertising space. We developed an Advert Manager in response to this. The result is a powerful, simple-to-use, site-wide Advert Management System that provides full reporting. If you are seeking to generate revenue from your website, this is an indispensible tool. The system we've developed has three distinct parts:

Advert Placement

Generally, adverts can appear just about anywhere, but the actual positions of the adverts must be defined. So, for example, a website may have space for a banner advert in the header that appears globally (on all pages) and a mini-ad in the right-hand column that appears within only one section of the site, or on one particular page. We've developed a simple system for combining placement of global ads and placement of section or page-specific ads by using advert "placeholders" in various positions on the site. Positions for adverts can also be assigned on blogs and forums.

Advert Allocation

In order to create an ad campaign across the site, adverts can be allocated to available positions using a dedicated Advert Manager within our Content Management System. This allows the administrator to create new full campaigns with several adverts in various placements for each campaign. Currently only image adverts (JPEG, PNG or GIF, static or animated) are supported but, as with all our modules, if a wider range of options are required (eg: Flash based adverts, or HTML), we’ll expand our component accordingly.

In addition, each allocation is created with a start and end date, so that campaigns can be set up before they actually start, and an end-point can be set.

Adverts sharing the same placement are subject to a semi-random algorithm that ensures that no advert is shown significantly fewer times than its competitors.

Monitoring and Reports

Every time an advert is shown on a page (impressions), and each time it is clicked (clicks), the action is recorded. Click fraud prevention can be added to the module if necessary.

These impressions and clicks result in two types of reports:

• Site Reports, which organise the reports by site, then position, campaign, advert and finally date.
• Campaign Reports, which are organised by campaign, advert, site, position and then date.

The reports provide date-specific data for the number of impressions, the number of clicks, and the click-through-rate, which is a very good indicator of the effectiveness of the advert.

Reports are available either to view or to download. Viewed reports are designed to be easily printed, either to PDF, or straight to the printer. Downloaded reports are simple CSV files, which can be opened in Microsoft Excel or a similar program. All reports can be filtered with start and end dates.

Complete solution

These three sections together make up an Advert Management module that provides a powerful and highly customisable advert management system for a website, which is also very easy to use, and provides extensive, easy-to-understand statistics and reports. The only thing it doesn’t do is actually bill your advertisers.