[Zope] ZSQL Methods and +

[Bill Anderson]

(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