RE: [Zope] ZSQL Methods and +
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. Chris McDonough mailto:chrism@digicool.com Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com Publishers of Zope http://www.zope.org
-----Original Message----- From: Matt Miller [mailto:matt.miller@thelinuxstore.com] Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 5:24 PM To: Bill Anderson Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] ZSQL Methods and +
Bill Anderson wrote:
Matt Miller wrote:
I have just joined this list, so forgive me as I break my
cardinal rule
of reaidng a list for a while before posting.
I am working on a banner ad rotation system for my Zope installation. To that end I am using a rather simple algorithm to determine which ad should be shown:
While not specifically solving your problem, have you looked at the Advertsising Banner Folder product?
Yes, I have. I couldn't find a good way to produce the reports which my boss (and presumeably our customers) demand. I need to be able to count impresions AND click throughs.
I am currently working on modifiying and extending it, but am running into some issues.
Welcome to my world!
Each time an ad is selected, ads not shown have their "notshown" count incremented by 2. An ad is selected whenever the number of impressions remaining PLUS its "notshown" is the largest in the DB.
Hmmm sounds like that number could get quite large. Is this a method you are using for 'weighting' various banners? IOW, give certain banners a higher base notshown count?
Yes, this is a eighting. I have two considerations in the weighting. One I don't want to just shuffle thru the banners.. some customers ma buy twice as many banners as another.. usually they want maximum short term impact, so I don't want to stretch their 10 million impressions over 100 million hits (in the case of ten banner sin the system).. but I don't want to wait for the numbers to equalize, either. This method seems like a 'fair' way to get heavy buyers heavy rotation up front.
I forgot an important piece of this. When a banner IS shown, its notshown gets reset to 0. So the idea is if you have more impressions, we show you more often.. but not to the exclusion of the other ads in the system... eventually they will get 'niced' up to the top, even if they only have one impression left and another has 10 million.
I know I will need a more sophisticated algorithm in the future, but for today, I just need my addition!
This is part of where I am working on in a banner product.
Cool, maybe I should look more carefully at the banner product. I have written one similar to the one I am trying to recreate here, so it seemed this would be quicker... but perhaps not if I can't add in my SQL selects.
-- Matt Miller matt.miller@thelinuxstore.com
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(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
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Chris McDonough