Published: Wednesday, January 03, 2001
Developing a Customizable Banner Rotation System
By Peter McMahon
| To Learn More About Banner Rotation Systems... |
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This article presents a couple ways to build a banner rotation system on
your Web site. There are, however, many ways to accomplish this!
To read articles on the bevy of techniques that can be used to create
a banner rotation system, be sure to check out the:
Banner Rotation Article Index!
ALSO! Part 2 of this article is up and read:
Extending the Customizable Banner Rotation System!
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Introduction
One of the most popular forms of advertising on the Internet
are rotating banner advertisements. Using a banner rotation system, rather
than a static system, you can sell many more banner ads for a
smaller price. Another major advantage of using a banner rotation system
is that you do not need to manually edit each page once a customer's
contract has expired or a new contract begins. The system can also be
spanned over multiple pages (and sites, so long as such sites reside on the
same Web server).
To develop a customizable system we need to, as the saying
goes, "look back to look forward." For starters, we should examine
those tools that we are currently provided with to see what
we can improve and innovate on. We'll start with an examination of\
Microsoft's solution, the Ad Rotator (To learn more about the
Ad Rotator, be sure to read: Using the
Ad Rotator!).
The Microsoft Solution: The Ad Rotator
Microsoft bundles their Ad Rotator component with IIS. This COM
component provides functionality to load banners from a text file
with the banner definitions, including the alternate text, image size
and image location. The component only has a few properties and one
method. These are outlined below, with a brief description of their
usage and functionality, in the table below:
| Ad Rotator Properties |
|---|
Border | This specifies the value of the BORDER attribute of the image tag that will be displayed |
Clickable | This specifies whether the banner is a link or not |
TargetFrame | This specifies the TARGET attribute of the ANCHOR tag (if applicable) |
| Ad Rotator Method |
|---|
GetAdvertisement | This method is passed the location of the banner definition file as a parameter. It writes the image tag and accompanying anchor tag, if applicable. |
The banner definition file takes the following form:
REDIRECT url
WIDTH integer
HEIGHT integer
BORDER border
*
imageURL
linkURL
alternate text
impressions
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The first line, REDIRECT url, refers to the page that the
produced anchor tag must link to and pass the banner's link URL to as
a querysting. This is because the Ad Rotator component does not produce
a link directly to the site, but rather to an ASP page that you must
develop, which can simply redirect to the URL passed in the querystring,
or perform logging operations.
The WIDTH parameter specifies the value to be inputted into
the WIDTH attribute of the produced image tag, in pixels.
The HEIGHT parameter specifies the value to be inputted into
the HEIGHT attribute of the produced image tag, in pixels.
The BORDER parameter specifies the value to be inputted
into the BORDER attribute of the produced image tag, in pixels.
The asterisk (*) indicates the start of the actual banner
definitions. imageURL is the location of the banner file
(for example, http://www.somesite.com/images/banner_large.gif).
linkURL is the page/site that the banner should link to
(eg. http://www.somesite.com). alternate text is
the text that will be placed in the ALT attribute of the
image text (eg. "Come see Somesite's services!"). impressions
is the ratio of hits that the banner should receive. It has limit of
10000. This value is relative to the amount of other banners, and
their respective impression weightings. If there are three
banners defined, with weightings 2, 3 and 5, the first banner will be
displayed 20% of the time, the second 30% and the third 50%.
Implementation
The first thing that you need to do is create the banner definitions
file (call it adrot.txt if you intend to copy-and-paste
the code and create the system while you read). I firmly believe in
learning through examples, so below is a sample banner definition file
with hypothetical banners and links:
REDIRECT redirect.asp
WIDTH 480
HEIGHT 60
BORDER 0
*
http://www.somesite.com/banner.gif
http://www.somesite.com
Visit Somesite Now!
4
http://www.anothersite.com/banner.gif
http://www.anothersite.com
Come on over to Anothersite!
4
http://www.yetanothersite.com/banner.gif
http://www.yetanothersite.com
Yetanothersite.com – your online widget retailer
2
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In the above example, somesite.com and anothersite.com's
banners will be displayed 40% of the time each and yetanothersite.com's
banner will be displayed 20% of the time. Now we need to create the
ASP to insert the above banner. This code will be added to each page
that will have a banner displayed on it. It would probably be more suitable
to place it in an include file, to make administration easier, especially if you
need to change something, but here it is:
<%
Dim objAd
'Create the component
Set objAd = Server.CreateObject("MSWC.AdRotator")
'Get the ad from adrot.txt and write the link
Response.Write objAd.GetAdvertisement("adrot.txt")
'Destroy the object
Set objAd = Nothing
%>
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This code simply generates the link and image tag and writes it to
the page. You then need to create the redirection file which will
redirect the user to the link in the linkURL section of
the banner definition file, as well as perform click-thru logging
functions, if required. For this example, I will just perform the
redirection. (If you are coding this app as we go along, call this
file redirect.asp)
<%
Response.Redirect Request.QueryString("URL") %>
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That's it! All the hard work of randomly selecting a banner ad is done for
you by the component. (For those of you who don't want to
copy-and-paste the above code into the respective files, a download for
this sample is provided at the bottom of the article.) However, this
ease-of-use, as is usually the case, comes with the price of
inflexibility. With this system in place, how to you monitor banner
impressions (which banner advertisers often demand)? And how do you handle
different categories of banners for different parts of a site?
And what if a client deposits his payment and wants his banner
running NOW and you're on a week holiday half a world away from your
Web server? (My solution only helps if you can get to an Internet Cafe,
but if you couldn't you wouldn't have gotten you're client's e-mail
informing you to make the change anyway) If you've got 5,000 clients
advertising, administering that text file is going to become really
tedious. The solution – an architecture designed to be flexible and scalable
to large volumes of data – a database.
Now that we've looked at how to create a simple banner rotation system
using Microsoft's Ad Rotator component, it's time that we look at a more
customizable, powerful solution: a custom, data-driven banner rotation
application. In Part 2 we'll
examine one way that one can go about creating such a system!
Read Part 2!
