Accounts allow users to login to the control panel and get their work done. There are three types of accounts, each of which are designed to be used by different types of users based upon the tasks that they need to complete. Commonly, you will see these different account types referred to as roles throughout this user manual and other documentation. An overview of each account type, which includes administrators, advertisers, and publishers is given in the sub sections that follow.
Administrator accounts have the potential to grant users full access to the functionality of the control panel. Generally, you will want to reserve administrator accounts for the employees of your company. Sharing accounts between multiple employees is not a recommended practice. Typically, you will need to give your accounting department, account managers, sales representatives, system administrators, and webmasters different levels of access to the control panel to restrict them to accessing only the functionality that is required for them to perform their assigned tasks. The deep set of permissions available to administrator accounts allows you to accomplish that by enabling you to control access rights on a per-user basis. For example, you can create administrator accounts for your accounting department employees that only grant them access to accounting reports.
Advertiser accounts should be created for companies or individuals that pay you to advertise on your web site(s). At times, your company may also want to run various in-house ads too. To accommodate that need, it is suggested that you also create an advertiser account for your company.
Publisher accounts should be created for companies or individuals that you outsource delivery of your ads to. It is not recommended that you create publisher accounts for internal use on your own web sites. Instead, it is recommend that you organize your zones into groups by web site if you operate more than one web site and wish to be able to report on each web site individually.
Campaigns are used to schedule media to be run in your zones. A campaign may contain multiple media and can be assigned to any number of zones. Many criteria, such as start dates, stop dates, impression limits, frequency capping, geographical targeting, and priorities are available to help you precisely control and optimize the delivery of your campaigns.
With so many options, you wouldn't be wrong to assume that campaigns are complex. The key thing to understand is that campaigns connect your media to your zones. This relationship is illustrated in the diagram that follows.
There are a couple of things that you should gather from the diagram above. The first thing is that campaigns can be assigned to multiple zones. You can see that Campaign #1 is assigned to both Zone #1 and Zone #2. The second thing is that campaigns can contain more than one media. Take a look at Campaign #2 and you can see that it contains three media, which themselves are of different types including a graphic banner, a flash banner, and an HTML banner. The third and final thing that you should notice is that when a zone contains multiple campaigns, it will rotate them according to their targeting and priority criteria. If you look at Zone #2, you can see that it contains three campaigns to be rotated. However, Campaign #2 is targeted to only U.S. visitors, so visitors from other countries will only see the other two campaigns.
Files are the digital assets of your media, such as a GIF, JPG, or SWF creative. While it's possible to upload your files to other web servers, it's strongly recommended that you upload them with the control panel for the following reasons:
Folders can be used to organize your files if you have a lot of files. A folder can contain an unlimited number of files. Along the same lines, there are no limits how many folders you can create and folders can be nested an unlimited number of levels deep.
Media is a generic term used to refer to banners, dynamic ads, text links, pop ups, and pop unders. You'll create a media for every advertisement that you serve. As the definition for campaigns states, media are reusable components that can be assigned to any number of campaigns.
A banner is a graphical advertisement, typically in the shape of a square or rectangle that is placed within the content of your web page. All common graphical formats are supported, including Applets, BMP, Flash, GIF, JPG, and PNG. For more complex needs, such as web forms, HTML code is also supported.
Designed specifically for floating layer ads and full-page overlays.
A text ad is nothing too fancy. For a simplistic hyperlink, the plain text type will meet your needs. If you want to do something a little more stylish like the text ads popularized by Google, you should use the rich text type instead as it allows you full control over the HTML and CSS markup.
A window ad is designed to open an advertisement or web page in a new browser window. That window is called a pop up if it's opened into the foreground or a pop under if it's opened in the background. An additional window type, third-party, is also available that lets third-parties open the window if it's not known in advance whether it should be a pop up or a pop under.
Groups can optionally be used to organize your zones into sets for reporting purposes. If you operate more than one web site, you'll probably want to create a group for each of your web sites. That will allow you to generate a group reports to view statistics for each of your web sites on an individual basis.
If you've been advertising on the Internet for a long time, you're probably already aware that the Interactive Advertising Bureau publishes a standard set of sizes for banner advertisements. This standard set of sizes can be viewed by clicking on the following link:
The system comes pre-configured with those sizes already created for your convenience. While we recommend using those sizes because they are standardized, you might have other sizes that you need to use on your web sites. That's not a problem because you can add as many new sizes as you need and remove the ones that you don't need too. In fact, it's a good idea to do just that because having a pre-defined list of sizes versus allowing users to enter sizes when creating media allows you to prevent users from creating media of sizes that you don't allow on your web sites.
Themes are designed to describe the types of content present on publisher web sites. If you create or edit a publisher account, it's possible to associate any number of themes with their account. It's then possible to target campaigns to those themes to deliver them only to publisher sites with content related to the campaign.
You might be wondering why you would use themes instead of creating separate zones for each of your publishers? Well, you've really answered your own question. By using themes, you can cut down on the number of zones you have to manage by sharing zones among many publishers.
Zones are used to define a group of campaigns to be displayed at a specific position or positions on one or more pages of your web site or web sites. Small web sites will only require a few zones, but larger web sites might require over a hundred zones. It all depends on how much fine-grained control you want over ad placement. If you want to be able to target ads to individual pages of your web site, a separate zone will be needed for each page. However, if you don't want that much control, it is perfectly acceptable to reuse the same zone for a collection of web pages. In fact, you will probably find it logical to reuse zones for multiple web pages if your web site is organized into sections or categories.
Let's look at an example of how you might organize zones for a small web site.
As you look over the diagram above, there are a couple of things that you should notice.
While zones are a powerful tool to control how you define rotations and place your ads on your web site, there is one case where they will not work for you. If your web site uses a single template to define the look and feel of your web site, you may want to place a zone within the template rather than within the content of your individual web pages. In order to make those zones that are placed in the template work as if they were unique to each content page, you will probably need to use custom targeting or keyword targeting. Both of those would allow you to dynamically pass a page title or category name to the ad server to be targeted.