I am implementing PhpAdsNew into a XOOPS site I am not sure what the best approach is and how the application works enough to set things up correctly. I have the application working just fine and have successfully tested invocation in the XOOPS template as well as in a custom block.

I am however a bit confused as to the best approach in setting things up. This is what I “think” I want to do :)

I want to be able to have different banners from different advertisers in the same zone but I am confused about just how to accomplish this. It seems that I need to have all banners within a particular campaign in order to assign them to a zone but Campaigns seem to be are advertiser specific so I have not found a way to do this.

Also I would like to be able to use the same banner in different zones and not sure how to do that either.

My thinking was to create a zone for each page/section location in my XOOPS site that I would them put in a custom block and place the block where I want to display banners.

For example Header banner – adding invocation to theme.html file, then I want to ad various banners with the same width but different lengths displayed in the same zone, say the left menu column on just my forum or news pages. But it seems that I can only have banners with the same exact size.

How do I approach having one advertiser wanting say a 125x 90 banner in the same spot that another advertiser wants a 125 x 240 banner?

This has already been done. Maybe you can get some ideas from this article.

https://xoops.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2573

Regards

Thanks for that I appreciate the referal. I have already read through that article and it was very helpful to getting the invoaction to working in the templates and custom blocks.

However, that is not the issue I am having at the moment. The article does not address the questions I have about the best way to set up PAN to work the way I want it to in Xoops. What I meant by 'strategy' is more related to the best method for PAN setup to function the way I want in Xoops, not how to implement the banners themselves in Xoops.

Sorry if I was not very clear in my original post :)

When creating your zones, select custom banner size and use "*"
without the quotes, this will allow you to run any size banner in that zone.

I have setup pan on this site www.westcoaster.ca running multiple banners and sizes in different zones.

That sounds like a good idea I will give it a try. As for my other questions. I guess reading the documentation would be a good start I thought I read the docs aparently I only read the admin / install instructions. It has been a week from hell. Anyway I went through the User Guide and got all my questions answered and cleared up my confusion. Silly Me! Thanks all

@technobia
I have just installed PAN and I confess that I too am still trying to get my head around the procedures for selling and managing banner campaigns.

Like you, I also set up a zone in my theme.html for 468x60 full banners. I'm gonna try to sell space here as run-of-site on standard rotation for 3, 6 or 12 month duration. So at any one time I would hope to have between 5 and 10 different banners running in that zone, each from a different advertiser. That figure is arbitrary, I don't know if there is a limit on how many banners you are supposed to put into a rotation to keep advertisers happy?.

I can see that PAN enables you to manage campaigns by impression count (CPM), but all the sites I've seen selling banners that way seem to have serious vistor statistics to back up their sales pitch!.

As far as managing each banner, the plan is that when (or if) I sell the first banner, I will:

1) Set up an advertiser.
2) Add a campaign called '3 month campaign' or whatever and set the expiry date.
3) Upload the single banner to the campaign folder and link the campaign to the zone.

To add a second banner from a second advertiser to the rotation, AFAIK you simply repeat the process and link their campaign to the same zone.

If you add two campaigns like this and select Inventory/Publishers & Zones, then select the zone and click the 'Probability' tab, you'll see both the banners listed, each with a 50% probability value in the rotation. As more campaigns are linked to the zone, the probability figures change.

The nice thing about campaigns is that they enable you to sell advertisers 'double' or 'triple' rotation for their ad at a premium. You set this by changing the 'weight' value for the campaign, e.g. from '1' to '2'. So in a zone with 3 banners, a double-rotation campaign banner gets a probability factor of 50% and the other two standard-rotation banners get 25% each.

The other nice thing about campaigns is when the campaign expires, PAN stops displaying the banner and sends the advertiser an email telling them that their campaign has expired with an offer to renew.

To enable me to sell targeted banners, I have also set up a different custom sidebar block in each section of the site. In PAN I have a zone for each of these blocks. Once again, the plan is that the banners shown here would be in a rotation. These ads could actually be fixed (which is called, I believe, 'page sponsorship') but... I want to sell banner space via the website and a PayPal account. To sell page-sponsor space you really need to display availability, e.g. the 'News' section may be booked up for 6 months. Of course if you're taking telephone calls, I believe page sponsorship can be a lucrative deal to offer... especially when everyone wants to sponsor the homepage at Christmas!.

What Lloyd has done on the (very impressive BTW ) westcoaster site is create a column of DIVs in side blocks with each DIV linked to a different zone. From what I can see, these banners are fixed position, presumably sold for a time period.

Which method you use ultimately depends on the type of site. With rotation you take up less room of the page with banner ads, which can be an unwanted distraction for some people. With fixed positions, advertisers know their banner will always be seen by new visitors.

I would certainly like to know which method is the most successful!.

One tip I have learnt is that if you use campaigns to auto-expire banners, there is a possibility you might actually run out of banners to serve to a zone. If you look in the zone options 'Advanced' tab, you'll see the default action when this happens is for PAN to stop displaying banners.

To avoid this happening, I created a campaign called 'Default banners' with the site owner's name as advertiser. I didn't link the campaign to a zone but simply added default banners of various sizes and gave each a keyword, e.g. 'default_468x60', default_120x90' etc. Then in each zone, I changed the action to 'Select banners using the keywords below' and entered the appropriate keyword.

The other possible option - 'Display the selected zone instead' enables you to create a 'chain' and feed banners from another zone to one that has just run out of steam.

I hope some of this may have been of some help.