(CC'ed to the ZCommerce list as I think it is apropos) Chris McDonough wrote:
Matt,
I'm in the process right now of establishing use cases for banner ad management products. Many of our customers are asking for this kind of thing. We haven't decided yet whether to build a product, build on the efforts of the community, or to refer our customers to outsourcers or 3rd-party software tools. But I'd be very interested in hearing what your "perfect" banner ad management software would look like.
Sure. For me, an ideal (sorry, can't bring myself to say perfect :) banner system would have the following: o Impression tracking o Click-through Tracking o Time limits and periods for banner display o Weighting of banners o Classification of banners o Interoperability with 'external banners' o Report screens Now, to elaborate a bit. The first three seem rather self-explanatory. I believe we have covered weighting, but I will add that it would allow for per-banner weighting and per advertiser weighting. This combination is admittedly thorny. Classification of Banners I would like to have banners that are relevant to a given page, and can be triggered by SQL/ZCatalog search methods. Case in point: targeted banners based upon search keywords like Yahoo does. Interoperability with External Banners As I mentioned, a very common (the most?) situation now is that the banners are not stored on your system, but rather you receive a snippet of html that does the work. These originally were intended for non-rotating banners, and for maintaining content control, but this is changing (well, for me at least :). Being able to have a radnom banner selected that can either be locally stored, or an html snippet is of key importance. Report Screens As mentioned, the ideal system would need to be able to display a current-status of impressions, click-throughs, remaining time, click-throughs, impressions as apropriate. There should be at minimum two screens; one for the customer and one for the admin. The admin screen swould show the details such as weight and keywords. The customner screen may or may not show classifications, keywords, etc. Well, that sounds like a reasonable start to me. Further additions might include the ability to do banner serving for other sites, as well as an referral program. Those can wait till after the base system is up, IMO. Bill -- In flying I have learned that carelessness and overconfidence are usually far more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks. -- Wilbur Wright in a letter to his father, September 1900