Tutorials » Setting Up Website Advertising Using Microsoft AdServer - Ad Manager
Ad ManagerBefore we consider how to make a request for an ad on an individual web page, we shall look at how you can manage your sponsors and their ads using Ad Manager. The first thing to do is to add a customer to the database, so we begin by clicking the Start button and navigating to Programs/Microsoft Site Server/Commerce/Ad Manager. This will fire up Ad Manager presenting us with the following interface:
Click on the Customers icon in the top left-hand corner and you'll be taken to the New Customer page. Here you'll find a 'Add New Customer' button. Click this and you'll see a form into which you can enter the customer's details:
Once you've added the information you want (only the Customer Name and Customer Type are required), you'll need to start an advertising campaign and add their ads to it. On the right hand side of the Ad Manager interface you'll see the campaigns section. Here click the 'Add New Campaign' button to add a new campaign.
In the first field of the New Campaign form enter a name of your choice for the campaign. The second and third fields are for the Start and End dates of the campaign respectively (the default start date is the current date, and the end date is one month later). Alter these as necessary. Finally, select one of two options to determine how the ads are scheduled. (For any advertising campaign you can schedule ads either on the number of clicks they receive, or on the number of requests, but cannot mix the two.)
Once you've filled in these details click the 'Ad Campaign' button. You'll now see your ad campaign listed under Campaigns to the right of the Customer Property details. All ads, be they full-size banners, button images, text or whatever, are referred to as campaign items in Ad Manager, so to include your customer's first ad click on the campaign name and then click the 'Add New Campaign Item' button which you'll see on the right hand side of the next screen. You'll then be prompted for the type of campaign item you wish to add. Here you have a choice of the following 6 types:
- IMG:
an image that links to another URL - TEXT:
text that links to another URL - HTML:
literal HTML code to be passed to the page - NOCLICKIMG:
a static image - BUYNOW:
an image that launches a Buy Now wizard for a Commerce Server site - NETSHOW:
a Microsoft NetShow video advertisement - ENLIVEN:
a streaming ad displayed using Narrative’s enliven software
- Item Name:
Enter a name of your choice for the ad. - Status:
Select either 'Active' or 'Inactive'. - Run Type:
select either 'Paid' or 'House'. - Start Date:
Enter the date from which the ad should start being displayed. - End Date:
Enter the date when the ad should stop being displayed. - Ad Requests:
Enter the number of requests to be allowed for the ad. If it is a house ad, enter 0. - Exposure Limit:
Select 'none' if you don't want a limit on the number of times one person can see any particular ad in a session, or else limit the exposure to 1, 2 or 3 times. - Date Received:
The date the ad was received. - Day:
check the relevant radio buttons for the days on which you want the ad to be available for display - Start Time:
Choose a start time for those days when the ad can be displayed. - End Time
Select an end time for those days when an ad is available for display. - Ad Type:
Already selected in the previous stage - Ad Size:
Select from one of a number of standard, IAB-approved sizes, or ones you created yourself. - Image URL:
Enter the URL of the image. - Click URL:
Enter the clcick-through URL of the ad. - Alt Text:
Enter the text for the ALT attribute of the image.
Now that you have an ad included in your campaign you may want to target it toward certain visitors of your site. The way this is done is with tags. These are strings containing information about the page on which an advertisement appears. The ASP code which requests an ad for a particular slot, passes the Ad Server object an array of these tags as an argument to the GetAd method (this will be described in more detail in the next section). These can contain whatever information you like. To illustrate the use of tags we shall assume that there is a page on our website devoted to the subject of XML. A request for an ad on that page, therefore, could include a tag such as 'subject.xml'. This target tag could then be associated with individual ads in Ad Manager to either increase the likelihood of that ad being selected for that page, or exclude it completely. Each target tag can be associated with one of the following 3 actions:
- Target
- Require
- Exclude
So to associate a particular campaign item with one or more tags, select it under Campaign Items in Ad Manager, and then in the Campaign Item Targets section enter the tag in the Tag field, select which of the above three actions you desire, and click 'Add New Target'. Assuming you entered 'subject.xml' in the Tag field, then the 'Target' action would mean that that campaign item would have a slightly increased chance of being selected for a slot with the same tag, whereas those slots without it would be less favored. The 'Require' action would mean that a slot's taglist would have to include 'subject.xml' for that ad to be selected, and the 'Exclude' tag would mean that the ad could never appear in such a slot. Now let's look at how to request a campaign item on one of our pages.
