Thread

Haven’t used anything for this in the past, but have a need now.

What software do you, or your clients use to manage adverts on their sites?

Hi, thanks a lot. I’d been trying for ages to make my own banners with photoshop, but that program is just impossible! I’ll be giving these sites a visit.

Bittads does not create banners for you - it delivers them to your pages. You will still have to create the banners in the first place - same as the Google and OpenX - oh your just spamming the site.

Hi Simplyee,

I have just launched a site (in the last hour actually) that required a solution for managing banner ads.

http://www.topgolfer.ie

The requirements were fairly simple as the advertisers in this case are sponsors so it’s not run on a PPC basis. I tried both Open X and Google Ad Manager and found both overly complicated, GAM even had display problems with the site as I suspect the js used was having trouble with the url structure of my EE site.

In the end I went much more user-friendly option in BittAds. It lacks some of the features of the other services but is also much simpler to use.

http://www.bittads.com/

Hope this helps,

Liam

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

Question though. How would I handle ads displayed on category pages. I’m using categories to distinguish site sections i.e. Sports, Lifestyle etc and my url structure is http://www.site.com/article/category/sports...

Any one have any ideas?

Thanks for the reply. After some fiddling around though I figured it out. I just put the script between the {exp:weblog:category_heading} tags and specified bitt.zone to change according to the category name. See the example below:

{exp:weblog:category_heading weblog="{section}" parent_only="yes"}
[removed][removed]
  [removed]
   bitt.instance = 'xxxx';
   bitt.zone = '{category_name} Category Page';
   bitt.location = 'xxxx';
   bitt.keywords = [];
   bitt.showAdOnLoad('xxxx');
[removed]
{/exp:weblog:category_heading}

Hope this helps someone else.

I don’t think I want to even try to figure that out.  😊

fwiw you can use targeting channels in OpenX to do much the same thing by passing a site variable with your zone embed code.  When serving ads using local mode (the non-javascript method) all it takes is the following line of code before your view_local function call:

...
<?php
    $_REQUEST['<your openx site variable name>'] = '{your_ee_variable_name}';
?>
...

then you set up a new targeting channel in OpenX with delivery limitation “site variable is equal to name: <your openx site variable name> value: <whatever your EE variable contains>”

after that, you can use the targeting channel as a delivery limitation for your banners

nothing to it 😉

Cool. Thanks for the tip.

Hi ender,

I’ve been asked to switch to OpenX cause BittAds takes too long to serve our ads. I see the solution above but I’m really not that familiar with OpenX as yet. Would you mind explaining what you posted again. I’m still trying to find my way around OpenX. The interface is a little more complex than BittAds.