Quick Start Guide for DynAds Pro

Brief Information

In DynAds Pro, ad data is organized in Accounts, Categories, Ad Types, Ads, Campaigns and Zones, as shown symbolically in the following drawing.

All data manipulation is done via the admin/user panel, dynadmin.pl.

You can create multiple accounts each having their own ads and campaigns. The new accounts can login to the admin panel with the access rights the admin has assigned through the account profiles. The setup program creates a typical advertiser profile for you when you create the administrator account. Accounts may have their own categories, ad types, ads, and campaigns. Additionally, accounts can use the categories and ad types of admin, if it is enabled in the profiles.

Categories and Ad types are listings only used to label and to categorize the ads for reporting.

Ads are the basic building blocks. Ads represent the content of the actual advertisement.

Campaigns represent how the ads will be targeted. You can specify the number of clicks, impressions, the periodic quota, the active date time range, the active hours, and targeting keywords and IP ranges. In addition, you can specify that if a visitor tracking cookie is to be placed to the visitor's browser upon a click or impression of one of the ads of the campaign. If a visitor is tagged by a cookie, then that cookie is saved with every record of any campaigns in DynAds Pro to track the visitor.

Campaigns may have more than one ads. And a single ad can be in more than more campaigns. Selection method of the ads from a campaign depends on the options chosen in the code generator menu.

Zones represent a list of campaigns grouped for rotation on a page. You can weight each campaign in a zone. In addition, each zone can be assigned a default campaign. If all the campaigns in a zone are disabled or are not active, then the default campaign of the zone is used. If there is no default campaign defined for the zone, then the global default ad copy entered in the setup program is used.

After defining ads, campaigns and zones, you can obtain the ad rotation code snippets in the "Code Generator" menu. If you want to obtain a tracking URL for one of the ads in a campaign, then use the "Redirection URL" menu to generate it. Use "Access Code" menu to obtain ad rotation codes.

Choose the access method you want to use in the drop-down menu and click the ">>" button to see the options for your selection.

First, select the zone for which the code will be generated. As a general rule, DynAds Pro selects the active ads of the campaigns in the zone (ads that are not disabled, matches to the credit, time, IP and keyword criteria) and then applies the ad selection method to obtain one or more ads, and finally it applies the list operations to the resulting ad(s).

If you are using keyword targeted campaigns in the zone and want to select campaigns for specific keyword(s), enter them in the target keywords edit box. If you do not want to use static keywords but rather to select keywords dynamically via some form of scripting, then let this field empty. In such a case, you can change the value of the "kw" query parameter in the URL of the resulting code.

When you finish selecting the code generation options, click "Generate Code" button, and the access code will be displayed in a new window. Copy the code and paste to the page you want the results to show up.

More Information

Before digging into DynAds Pro admin panel and access codes, it will be very helpful to do a planning about what type of ads to display on which pages and on which part of the pages, particularly if your number of pages are high.

In the ad access (rotation) codes, you should specify the zone to use, the keyword(s) for further campaign selection, the ad selection method, the display method and the number of ads to select.

You should consider using the same zone for similar rotations on your pages. For example, the top 480x60 banner locations on all your pages can be considered as a single zone. Then, you can use the keywords to categorize the campaigns on specific pages. For example, on the page related to "Computers", you can use keywords "computers,hardware,software" to select campaigns having one if these keywords. When you do not specify a keyword, all of the campaigns in the zone are considered for selection.

BOTTOM UP DESIGN

In the bottom up design, you start by defining ads first, then define the campaigns and then the zones. After the zone is created, you generate a rotation code for the zone and paste it to your webpage. Later, when you change any part of the zone, campaigns or ads, the changes will be reflected to your webpage automatically.

When you apply bottom-up method, you do not need to iterate between levels. That is, for example, once the campaigns to be used in a zone are defined you do not need to come back to campaigns menu for further editing which is typical in top-down design.

1. Go to the "Ads" menu and create a new ad and enter the ad content (as defined below). Repeat this step as many as you want.
2. Go to the "Campaigns" menu, and create a new campaign (or open an already defined campaign in edit view). Add the just defined ads into the campaign.
3. Go to the Zones menu and create a new zone (or open an already defined zone). Add the just created campaign (if it is not existing) into the zone.
4. Go to the "Code Generator" menu and create the rotation code for the zone. Paste the rotation code into your page(s).

TOP DOWN DESIGN

In this approach, you act in reverse of the bottom-up design philosophy. This method, requires several iterations between steps.

1. First create the zone you want to use. Since, the campaigns are not created yet, leave the zone empty.
2. Go to the code generator menu, and create the rotation code for the zone. And, paste the code into your page(s). Repeat this step if you want to use the same zone in different places/pages.
3. Enter to the "Campaigns" menu. Create a new campaign by entering as much information as you can. Since the ads to be in this campaign are not yet ready, the campaign is empty for now.
4. If you have ads to add to this campaign, go to the "Ads" menu and create new ads. Enter the ad contents into the ads.
5. Return back to the campaign and add just created ads into it.
6. Return back to the zone, and add the just created campaign to the zone.

CREATING & DEFINING ADS

Ads contain the actual ad content. An ad can be placed into more than one campaigns. As the ad content, you should enter the exact html content of the ad. DynAds Pro delivers the ad content as it is, apart from redirection (tracking) link replacement. Each ad can be labeled with "category" and "ad type". These labels will be used for obtaining accumulated reports in the reports menu.

The ad content is described in 3 fields, "Header HTML", "Redirection URL" and "Footer HTML". It is best explained by way of an example.

If the original Html code of the Ad is:

This is a great product from <A HREF="http://XYZCompanyWebSiteURL">XYZ Company</a>.

Then, you should divide the content in 3 parts as shown below:
Header HTML: This is a great product from <A HREF="
Redirection Link: http://XYZCompanyWebSiteURL
Footer HTML: ">XYZ Company</a>.

That is, when the 3 fields are appended the original ad copy should be obtained. When the "Redirection URL" field is not empty, DynAds Pro replaces the original URL with a tracking URL when delivering the ad. When the link is clicked on the ad copy, DynAds Pro is informed about the click, and the visitor is re-directed to the original URL of the ad.

In DynAds Pro, each ad can be labeled with a "category name" and "ad type". Such a labeling is totally arbitrary and depends on you. Categories and ad types are used in reports to obtain gross sum results for that category or ad type. Setup already created a category named "default" and an ad type named "default" for you. If you want to have more categories, then you should define them before defining the ads for those categories. For this, enter to "Ads" menu. and then "categories" sub-menu. Press "New" and enter the name of the new category. Then save it by pressing "save" button. Repeat as many as you want. Do it for ad types if you want to have more ad types defined.

Steps

1. Enter to "Ads" menu. Choose "New" to create a new ad.
2. On the define new ad menu, select the account, category and the ad type this ad will belong to.
3. Enter a descriptive name for the ad.
4. Description field is optional and for your use.
5. Now there are 3 fields, "Header HTML", "Redirection URL" and "Footer HTML". You have two options to fill in these fields.

   A) If you do not want to track the clicks to the banner links, then enter the complete html code of the ad into "Header Html" field. Leave "Redirection URL" and "Footer Html" fields empty.

   B) If you want to track the clicks to the banner links, Then you should divide the original html into 3 parts. You extract the destination URL in the HREF attribute and write it into "Redirection URL" field. All the code before the destination URL goes to "Header HTML" field, and all the code after the destination url, goes to the "Footer HTML" field. That is, if the ad content is:
   <A HREF="DestinationUrl"><IMG SRC="BannerImageFileUrl"></A>

   The fields should be
   Header Html: <A HREF="
   Redirection URL: DestinationUrl
   Footer Html: "><IMG SRC="BannerImageFileUrl"></A>

   When you append the 3 fields, you obtain the original html code. Even if the original html is a lot more different than the one given above, you should seek the HREF attribute of A tag in the code. And then break the code into 3 parts as shown above.

6. After you fill in all the fields, press Save button to save the ad.
7. In order to create other ads, either press the "New" to define a new ad, or press the "Clone" to copy the data of the current selected ad to the new ad. Edit the content on the "new ad" page and press "Save" to save the ad. Note that even when cloned, the ad is not saved until you press the save button.

CREATING & DEFINING CAMPAIGNS

Campaigns are used to group and target ads. A campaign can contain more than one ads, and an ad can be in more than one campaigns.

For each campaign, you can specify the number of clicks, views, the active date/time range, the active hours, and targeting keywords. In addition, you can specify that if a visitor tracking cookie is to be placed to the visitor's browser upon a click or view of one of the ads of the campaign. If a visitor is tagged by a cookie, then that cookie is saved with every record of any campaigns in DynAds Pro to track the visitor. For each ad in a campaign, you can specify a weight, abuse delay values, and ad blocking durations.

Selection method of the ads from a campaign depends on the options chosen in the code generator menu.

Assume you have defined 10 ads named "banner-1" to "banner-10". Now you have to place them into a campaign. Event if you do not target the ads for a specific event, you should create a campaign. If you want to target each ad separately, then you should create a campaign for each ad. If, on the other hand, you target them all, then you can place all 10 ads into the same category. Assume the second case for this writing.

Steps

1. Enter to "Campaigns" menu and press "New".
2. In the "define a new campaign" menu. enter the name of the new campaign.
3. DynAds can track visitors via persistent cookies. The campaign can be defined as an entry point for the visitor tracking by selecting the "set visitor tracking on" options. "Views" options specifies to set tracking cookie if an ad of this campaign is displayed to the visitor. Similarly the "clicks" options specifies to set tracking cookies if the visitor clicks an ad of this campaign (and if the ad is defined as having a redirection URL. Otherwise DynAds Pro has no way of knowing if an ad is clicked").
4. Description field is for your use.
5. Enter the campaign Type:

   A) If you select the campaign to be a default campaign, then it can be used as the default campaign of zones. Only admin can set a campaign as default.

   B) "Run of network" option allows the campaign to be active regardless of the number of views or clicks.

   C) "views" option specifies that the life time of the campaign is limited to the amount of credits defined in "credits left" field. At every display of one of the ads of this campaign, the credit amount is decreased by the amount stated in the "cost" field.

   D) "clicks" option specifies that the life time of the campaign is limited to the amount of credits defined in "credits left" field. At every click to one of the ads of this campaign, the credit amount is decreased by the amount stated in the "cost" field.

6. In addition you can specify an active time duration for the campaign. Out of this time range the campaign will not be active.
7. You can target specific hours of the week.
8. If you want to target this campaign via specific keywords, enter the keywords into the "target keywords" box as a list of comma separated keywords.
9. Press Save to save the campaign info.
10. In the "edit view" of the campaign, you can add the ads into the campaign. Scroll down the page. Select the ad to add and click to "Add" button. Repeat this step to add all of the ads you want.
11. You can specify the following values for each add in a campaign.

    A) Order no of the ads determines the position of the ad in the list of ads of the campaign. When the order no is equal, the formerly defined ad is placed before the later defined ad. The ads will be retrieved in this order for selection. Though, the selection operation may (and in most cases does) alter the order of the ads.

    B) Weight: The weight value is used when using "weighted random" ad selection method. The grater the weight the more the change to be selected.

    C) View and click abuse durations. These values are used to prevent repeated views or clicks to be counted as separate events within the corresponding duration. D) Ad view blocking duration. If this value is specified, the ad will not be displayed again until this duration expires.

CREATING & DEFINING ZONES

A zone contains the list of campaigns (actually, the ads of the campaigns) that will be rotated.

Steps

1. Enter the "zones" menu and press "new" to create a zone.
2. Enter the zone name and the description
3. If you previously defined some campaigns of type "Default", then you can select one of them to be the default campaign of this zone. The default campaign is used when there is no active ads in the zone. If the default campaign is not defined or does not have an active ad, then the global default ad defined in the setup program is used.
4. Press the "save" button.
5. In the "edit zone" view, down the page, you can add the campaigns into this zone.
6. For each campaign,

   A) Order no of the campaign determines the position of the campaign in the list of campaigns of the zone. When the order no is equal, the formerly defined campaign is placed before the later defined campaign. The campaigns will be retrieved in this order for selection. Though, the selection operation may (and in most cases does) alter the order of the campaigns.

   B) you can define a weight as for the ads in campaigns.

GENERATING ROTATION CODES

After defining ads, campaigns and zones, you obtain the ad rotation code snippets in the "Code Generator" menu.

In the "Content Rotation" menu choose the access method you want to use in the drop-down menu and click the ">>" button to see the options for your selection.

First, select the zone for which the code will be generated.

As a general rule, DynAds Pro selects the active (not disabled) ads in the zone, then applies keyword filtering to narrow down the list, then apply the ad selection criteria to obtain one or more ads, and finally it applies the list operations to the resulting ad(s).

If you are using keyword targeted campaigns in the zone and want to select campaigns for specific keyword(s), enter them in the target keywords edit box. If you do not want to use static keywords but rather to select keywords dynamically via some form of scripting, then let this field empty. In such a case, you can change the value of the "kw" query parameter in the URL of the resulting code.

If you want to select only one ad from the zone, then specify whether the "weighted random", the "uniform random" or the "server side sequential" method should be used.

If the weighted selection is used, every ad has the probability of being selected directly proportional to the weight of the campaign in the zone, and the weight of the ad in the campaign.

With uniform selection, every ad has equal chance of being selected regardless of the weight.

In the server side sequential case, the next campaign/ad in the zone is selected every time a request is done to DynAds Pro.

If you want to select and retrieve more than one ad, then specify the (maximum) number of ads to select in the "Number of Ads/Campaigns" text box.

The "Weighted random" method selects N ads randomly but according to the weights.

"Uniform random" methods selects N ads with equal chance.

"Random Slice" selects N consecutive ads among the list of active ads with the first ad being selected as uniform random.

"Server side sequential" selects N consecutive ads with the slice beginning is incremented at every request.

The "All of the ads" method returns all of the active ads in the zone.

"Ad Selection Scheme" determines how the initial list of ads are obtained. In the first preferred method, all ads of the campaign in the zone are bring together to form a big list and then the ads are selected from that list. In the second "Select campaigns first" method, first the campaigns are selected in the zone and then a random ad of the each selected campaign is included with the results. In the last method, the campaigns are selected first as in the second case, but now all the ads of the selected ads are included in the result without any further filtering.

If your final selection includes more than one ads, you can specify a post-list operation on the ads. You can randomize the order of ads in the list, randomly shift the list, reverse the order of the ads in the list, and finally first reverse and then shift the list.

If your results include more than one ad, then those ad copies are returned as appended

When you finished selecting the options, click "Generate Code" button, and the access code will be displayed in a new window. Copy the code and paste to the page you want the results to show up.

If you want to rotate banners in one place (such as the top banner on most sites. That is only one banner will be displayed at a time), then select one of the single ad selection schemes. For example select uniform random, to select banners with equal chance. Then press "Generate code" button to obtain a code similar to (for JavaScript method):

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript"
SRC="http://YourDomain/cgi-bin/dads/ad.pl?z=1&sel=urnd&kw=&dsp=js">
</script>
<NOSCRIPT>
<!-- Put alternate code here for browsers not supporting SCRIPT -->
</noscript>

Note that an example run of the above code will be shown under the text box. Select and copy (press ctrl-C or click to right mouse button and select copy) the code in the text box, and paste it to the place the ad should show up on your page.

If you want to rotate a list of ads (randomize the list), then select "All of the Ads/Campaigns in the zone" option in the "multiple ad/campaign" section, and select "randomize the list" option under the "List operation" section. Press the "Generate Code" button. You will get a code similar to

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript"
SRC="http://YourDomain/cgi-bin/dads/ad.pl?z=1&sel=all&lst=r&kw=&dsp=js">
</script>
<NOSCRIPT>
<!-- Put alternate code here for browsers not supporting SCRIPT -->
</noscript>

Note that the selected ads will be appended back to back.

If you want to limit the number of ads selected, then enter the number of ads to select into the "Number of Ads/campaign" text box and select "uniform Random Ads/campaigns" option (as an example). Press the "Generate Code" button. You will get a code similar to

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript"
SRC="http://YourDomain/cgi-bin/dads/ad.pl?z=1&sel=urnd&cnt=5&kw=&dsp=js">
</script>
<NOSCRIPT>
<!-- Put alternate code here for browsers not supporting SCRIPT -->
</noscript>

Note that the selected ads will be appended back to back.

Since the ads are appended back to back, the layout of the ads may not be so good. In order to correct it you have two options

1) Instead of using Javascript paste, you can use "JavaScript array" that loads the ads into variables. Then you have opportunity to place the contents in the variables in any place you like (with formatting). But such use requires some advanced knowledge.

2) You enter the formatting html tags along with each ad content. For example, in our example we entered the simple html link as the ad content. But we may enclose each ad content in formatting tags such as paragraphs:

<P>The original Ad html here</p>.

By the cloning mechanism of ads, you can easily populate once defined ad and its style.

For another example, say your text ads are composed of some text and a link as:

Hi <A HREF="URL-1">Click Here</a> for a great product.

If you want to display the one text ad selected from a group of ads, then you can put the styling HTML elements in the page and place the rotation code in the place the ad text should be. For example, consider you will be using tables as the ad formatting elements, then your page html would look like:

<TABLE><TR><TD STYLE="some CSS code goes here">
<DynAds Pro Ad rotation code that selects one ad goes here>
</td></tr></table>

On the other hand, if you want to display more than one ads selected randomly from an ad group (or zone in Pro), then you need to include some formatting elements in the ad html code. Considering the above examples, the ad HTMLs would be look like then;

<TR><TD STYLE="some CSS code goes here">
Hi <A HREF="URL-1">Click Here</a> for a great product.
</td></tr>

And the code on your page would be then

<TABLE>
<DynAds Pro Ad rotation code that selects more than one ads goes here>
</table>