Workflow

Create

There are a number of steps that you need to go through to set up a new creative. Although it's entirely possible to complete these steps in any order, you'll find that the following order generally results in you wasting the least amount of time. It's very easy to become confused about what you need to do next and even easier to miss a step if you don't complete these steps in the suggested order below.

1. Advertiser. If this is a new advertiser, you should first create an advertiser account for them. [Video Tutorial: Creating Advertisers]
2. Files. Did the advertiser give you any files to upload for their creative? If they did you should upload them before creating any media that will use them. Note, however, that some of the media types such a Applet banner, Flash banner, and graphic banner have the uploading feature built into them so this step is optional for them.
3. Media. The next thing that you need to do is create a media for each creative that your advertiser desires to run. [Video Tutorial: Creating Media]
4. Zones. In some cases you might actually have sold an advertiser a new ad space that didn't exist before. If that happens to be the case, you will need to create a new zone for it. Following the creating of the campaigns to run in the new zone, either you or your web master should use the code wizard to generate code to place it in your web pages. [Video Tutorial: Creating Zones]
5. Campaigns. The last step is to create campaigns to schedule all of your advertisers media to run in the zones they've requested. You'll notice that the last two steps of the new campaign wizard ask you to make media and zone assignments. That's why it's easiest if you create the campaign last. [Video Tutorial: Creating Campaigns]

Publish

Publishing your ads on your web site is a very easy thing to do. Using the code wizard, you can select the zone you want to place, check some options if necessary, and press a button to generate code to display your zone. After that it's as easy as copying and pasting the generated code into your web pages where you want to place the zone.

You will probably also notice that it's also possible to generate code for placing campaigns and media directly. It is not recommended that you do that unless you're placing static campaigns or media into a newsletter or other publication that will never change as far as the campaigns or media placed on them are concerned. For your web sites, however, it's suggested that you always use zones because the campaigns and media you run on them will change frequently. By using zones, you won't constantly have to re-publish any new ad placement codes to your web site because the zone codes will never change no matter how many changes you make to the campaign assignments of your zones.

Report

After clicking on reports in the toolbar you will be presented with a general summary report for the current month. Many times this report will provide you with the information that you were looking for. Sometimes you might want to dig a little deeper into that information though, in which case you will have to find the report you want in the reports navigation menu. At first that task may seem a little overwhelming because there are a huge number of reports, but you'll find that the reports are all organized pretty logically and the wizards to generate every report are all very user friendly and easy to use. Don't worry if you choose the wrong options when generation a report because it's possible to edit your report after generating it to change options quickly without having to start over from scratch. [Video Tutorial: Generating Reports]

Optimize

Suppose that you've been looking at the reports for a campaign and you've noticed that it is receiving a high number of click-throughs in a few of the zone it's running in. You have a couple of choices of how to optimize the campaign to take advantage of this situation. The easiest thing to do would be to edit the campaign, view its zone assignments, and then increase its priority in each of the zones that it performs well in to give it more impressions. If you don't want to increase the priority of the campaign at all, another option is to remove the campaign from some zones that it is not performing so well in to dedicate more impressions to the zones that are performing well. In some cases, such as with keyword targeting, you might find that improvements can be made by adjusting targeting criteria as well.