Ad Server version 0.1 beta

Hello Barry,

The plugin looks quite exciting and I will test it on my network. Anyway, can you describe in WPMU DEV style what can we do with this plugin, what can we use it for? Maybe this question doesn't make any sense as you have described it per options, but would you describe it like other WPMU DEV plugins are described?

Is this plugin for creating NETWORK WIDE ad campaign? (If it is, how it differs from Supporter advertiser, only with more functionality or does it something another?)

@Johnathan, thanks, I have missed this thread, because this was exactly the month I have made a pause in my membership, so while this thread was active, I was passive (cancelled membership), so thanks about that :)

Will definitely give this one a go if I get a chance. Thanks!

@Jonathan
Hmmm, maybe I'm going to have to give myself a kick and use a completely different UX/UI just to keep you on your toes :)

But seriously, this is a "this is what I picked up from the request thread" version, so shout any guidance / needs / must haves and they *will* be taken on board.

Great work Barry :)

Looking forward to all of your fe4edback guys - am especially interested in this being used on single WP sites too - an in terms of usability for new users... so don't hold back with the improvement suggestions etc.

@Barry,

Hmmm, maybe I'm going to have to give myself a kick and use a completely different UX/UI just to keep you on your toes :)

Lol - not at all. Why change something that already works ;)

Current Feedback
I notice that each subsite has its own ad management / tables?
I would say it is better to have one global table and have one main site manage the adverts/advertisers as advertisers won't be blog owners . Unless the idea is for *supporter* subsites to manage their own ad system?

Perhaps a (global table) option on/off switch so network owners can make money from advertising across their network, and network blog owners can be supporter to disable ads?
But let @David comment as this is more his brainchild and he has better understanding on how this would be best handled.

I'm just thinking there are 4 types of users.

Network admin - manages domain mapped sites - advertiser selects which domain mapped site he wants to advertise on at $X.xx
Network Admin - creates network - sells ad space across network to support network.
Nework admin selling ad management to subsites who in turn sell ads on their site
Single sites selling ads on their site

That's all the time I have for now - I'll be back as soon as I can squeeze some focused meaningful playtime in ;)

Greetings :-)

this appears to be totally awesome and interesting in watching the development thereof going from idea to production server quality :-)

Additionally awesome to be able to enable it for global tables too .....

Joe :-)

Oh boy... I've been wanting something for lichfieldlive.co.uk for so long! I'll apologise now for the barrage of feature requests (although this does make you my new favourite person Barry)...

Network activation options;
- managed centrally
- allow each sub-site to manage it's own advertisers, zones etc
- a combination of both (e.g. allow sub-sites to create only X zones)

Pricing
- pay monthly, weekly, daily or by impressions/clicks
- option to dictate price from network level or devolve to sub-site admins
- devolution can be dependent on supporter status/membership level

Payments
- pre-paid, single or subscription (auto-renew)
- pre-paid balance depletes according to click/impressions/time

Reporting
- impressions, clicks, cpc, cpm, total cost, click-through rate
- drill-down stats for; categories, tags, posts/pages
- per-zone stats
- summary report e-mailed to advertisers automatically every X days/weeks/months

Supporter/Pro Sites integration
- only supporters can use the plugin
- only supporters can create zones
- non-supporters have zones 'forced' on them (e.g. before/after content)

On the "devolution" of features to sub-site admins I'm imagining a page that lists everything the plugin can do (like a list of capabilities) where the super admin can simply check which elements the sub-site admins are allowed to over-rule.

On the front end it has to be;
- really, really, really easy
- one step for adding the advert and registering
- a second step for payment

I know that's a lot, sorry, but I'm excited :)

The best name for it would be display advertising...

@kshengelia - check the link Jonathan posted above for the main post concerning functionality, it has a few good examples of its intended use.

At the moment the men will show in the main admin area, I'll be adding in the network admin side in a futures beta ( likely to be the next one ).

I'm actually jumping up and down right now. literally uuuppp aaannnddd dddooowwwnnn!

+1 to everything Phil said!

Glad you guys like what you see so far, aim is to get this to really kick off standard asap.

@aphrodite - you don't actually have a raccoon to give away, do you ;)

Hi Barry (and everyone else),

I'm finally done with my deadline projects, had a night to sleep, and some quality coffee. So it's time to look at this very cool system Barry's been putting together.

Before I go onto specific comments and suggestions, I want to sort of set the scene. I fully appreciate anything Barry's building and if I'm providing notes, it's related to my experience running an ad-driven web business for more than a decade. I'm porting from a working (if very custom and breaking) ad serving system I built as part of the CMS I also built, and so some of my comments and examples will be based on what's worked for me, not necessarily what anyone else needs.

So, I just want to let you know that I'm thrilled in any form this takes, and these notes are just one guy's impressions. Also, I'm not specifically ordering these comments, but more writing down lab notes as I explore the system's functionality.

That said, let's start working through this baby!

The Ad Server menu (how cool is it to see that?) appears above the Dashboard. It probably should appear somewhat lower in the menu.

On the Edit Sites page, I like that you pre-populate the drop-down with possible sites, btu the Site name field probably could be populated from that selection. Although, if that requires some Ajax humping, it might not be necessary. Certainly low priority.

I'd recommend putting Edit Sites and Edit Zones near the bottom of the menu (near plugins and options) because these are likely to be very rarely modified, and never by an ad sales person. These will almost always be managed by the site admin. In ZENPRESS, we have the ability to make menus show or not show based on permissions level, and you might want to disable these menus if the user isn't a site manager. I think your membership plug-in provides these features.

ADVERTISERS

Let's talk about advertisers. Currently, ZENPRESS doesn't provide self-service advertising. When we get a sale, we go into ZENPRESS and enter the advertiser information. Part of the reason for this is that our sales are big and chunky. We have a relatively small number of advertisers, who usually make 4-digit ad buys. We'd rather hand-hold them and charge cards by hand, rather than let the system do that. The hand-hoiding relationship is a big part of what helps us keep advertisers during times they might otherwise be skittish.

To that end, on the New Advertiser pane, it's not clear what the Associated user account field is for. Is that for the system manager/advertising manager who's selling the ads, or is that meant for the advertiser himself or herself? I'd contend it's much important to have the advertising manager/sales person (even if that's just the Web site operator) in that field, than an advertiser. I'd therefore also recommend renaming it to something like "Advertising manager" or something to that end.

I noticed that there's an "Activate" and "Deactivate" button for advertisers, which is cool. But once you get a pile of advertisers (we have 116), you're probably going to want to have some sort of color-coding to tell who's active and what they're doing. Here's a few records from my advertiser list. You can see that it shows whether the advertiser is active, inactive, what sites they're advertising on, and even if their program is about to end (so, at a glance, we can see who to call to advise renewing).

I'll come back later for more on advertisers, when I get to reporting and analysis.

ZONES

I love that you pre-populate the Zone Advertisement Size with a set of pre-specified sizes. Zones probably should be set up for either individual sites, or across all sites. Basically, I'm trying to figure out how you could sell a run-of-network ad that ran across a bunch of sites if there's no network-wide zones.

Also, and this is a pretty critical issue, you only have graphics for your ad zones. We run a lot of text ads (which are clicked on far more than the graphics). These consist of headline, body, link prompt, and URL:

We run two of these, side-by-side and they're very effective.

We also have a mixed ad, which has both a graphic and text, which goes into our email newsletters. These are of the form:

We run up to ten of these, and each week (we mail weekly), we rotate the ads up. So, for example, the first week, Ad A is on top, Ad B is next, and Ad C is third. The next week, Ad B is on top, Ad C is second, and Ad A is third. Makes for fair exposure to advertisers and prevents arguments. We also have the ability to force an ad to a position, so an advertiser can purchase, say, position 1 for a given set of mailings.

We also run ads in our RSS feeds, which can be both the mixed-text-and-graphic version or just straight banners. This is probably pretty optional, since RSS feeds as a form of advertising traffic are declining.

This will probably make a relatively long post, so I'm going to stop here for a moment, and come back in a little while with more comments.

So far, the only big deal-killer I've found is the lack of non-graphic ads in the zone definitions.

Hi everyone,

I figured that one thing that might be helpful is a tour of the current ZENPRESS ad system, built in Userland Frontier. If you want to know about the scope of my migration project, Mason did a great recording at WordCamp last spring: http://vimeo.com/21118033

Anyway, here's a quick tour of how ads work now and have worked since about 2002 in ZENPRESS.

We have three main side-menu items. These (like everything in ZENPRESS) can be turned on and off based on the user's privs. For example, we used to have an outside sales rep, and while he needed to see his own ads and their traffic, we didn't want him to see the other ads in the system or, especially, be able to modify them.

The Advertisers menu is the main entry point into configuring the advertisers. As I mentioned in the first post, this has some useful information at-a-glance on the status of any given advertiser:

At the bottom of this screen is the New Advertiser button, which just adds a new advertiser to the system. It needs to be edited to be set up properly. Here's the Edit Advertiser screen:

This screen seemed well-designed initially, but as you can see, this advertiser has run 2101 ads with us, and we've also modified 2219 advertising records. Once you get to this number of ads, especially if you're doing statistics interatively, things break down, hard. I can no longer click into "Published Ads" without crashing my server (I'll show you that screen for a less-active advertiser).

The performance summary is valuable because it lets us take a call from an advertiser and see what's happening. We're also able to prepare and send reports. In practice, now, I'd probably put the "Send a report" feature on a different screen, because it takes so long to load this page.

Notice that this advertiser has run in two properties, so I can select one or the other property, or both, for reporting. This is how it's easy to see what an advertiser's business looks like. I also have a check button called "include individual click data," which provides a record for every click in the period requested. We don't use that now very often, because it can take forever to look up IP, geolocation, and DNS for every ad clicked.

There's also an automatic reporting feature. Notice that I can turn this on and off, I can specify the granularity of data to report, and I can also send the report to different people for different properties.

Before I go on, here's a quick view of one of the permissions screens. This one allows a given advertiser to show up in the main advertiser list, for given users. So, for example, if I manage Advertiser A and John manages Advertiser B, I could make sure John wasn't listed in Advertiser A and not only couldn't see the numbers, he wouldn't even see the company was an advertiser.

Next, let's look at a detail page for currently running ads, this time for an advertiser we just added this month. As you can see, we specfiy publication and property.

Publication is really only our Web site (we call that Magazine) and the email newsletter (which we call Weekly Update). Property is the site itself. Note that we have stats about individual ads right on this page, so it's easy to see, at-a-glance, how a given ad is doing.

Custom ads are important. This is so we can create custom mailings for customers and be able to track clicks in those emails. An advertiser will send us a piece of HTML we're going to send out, and we take each destination URL in their mailing, enter it into our form here, and get back a properly formatted URL that records information in our tracker when clicked:

http://zenpress.zatz.com/public/serveID?id=00025749&tracker=##CLICK_TRACKER##

The ##CLICK_TRACKER## tag is substituted with property and user information when the item is displayed or mailed.

On this same form, the Analyze link simply provides click-by-click data for the given ad. The Edit Ad link brings us into the ad editor:

There's a lot going on here. First, this is what comes up when we have a text ad. It's where we can delete an ad, if we chose to. We can also copy an ad, so if we need to later move it to another week or month, we don't have to type everything in again.

There's also a series of fields that comprise the ad, along with status, which allows us to leave an ad there for review, but not have it in rotation, along with enabling or disabling it.

Finally, there's a preview, so we can see what the ad will look like, when it's displayed on the Web site.

That's a pretty good overview of our system. There's a whole scheduling component, but that's incredibly complex, because we schedule certain ads to begin at certain times, and the key is we limit the number of advertisers and rotations. For what you're doing, I don't think that's necessary.

We also have a whole "House Ad" system, which allows us to mix and match ads we run for ourselves (like, promoting my books), ads we run from ad networks (like Google), and ads we run for active, paying advertisers. I'd like to see some House Ad system, and if you need, I can take you through that.

We also have something called Ad Subscriptions, which are ads that just run forever, until the advertiser cancels. That's a great way to build advertiser loyalty, but you could do the same by putting an end date into the system that's way far out.

Anyway, that should do. Thanks for everything!

--David

-- David

Saunt, I think WPMU:DEV has a revenue-sharing plug-in. I have to run out, but I seem to recall reading about it some time ago. If I recall correctly, you can set it to a given user's Google ad code and send some percentage to person A and some percentage to the house.

I'm sure someone else out there has a better understanding of that.

David is correct, here is the plugin http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/ad-sharing

This absolutely rocks!

As Saunt above said, there's no way for me to keep up with the complexity of this, but you might also be able to grab a few tips from http://www.oiopublisher.com/ (unless you've already bypassed that in features & functionality).

Keep on coding! ;-)

Awesome! fantastic plugin. Can't wait to see how it shapes out. I'll give it a test install and see if I can come up with some feedback.
Thanks!
Jon

Will have to play around with this soon, but a few things on the serving side that would make this great

- Roadblocking or the ability to ensure ads from a certain campaign are always displayed together
- Interstitials complete with a timer setting to include a "this ad will close in x seconds" notice or something.

Hi Guys,

wow, some detail indeed, and the quest continues for an easy to use system for advertising and monetising sites.

I'm working with Doubleclick For Publishers (DFP) Small Business for now, (Google), finding it challenging but powerful. The thing it has is an ad network and adsense already connected in there - so a ready made supply of advertisers and an out of the box revenue stream for someone just getting started.

I'm very interested in this new WPMU Adserver development, as an alternative, especially if easy to integrate and use across a multi site, but wondered about this ability to plugin either the DFP Ad tags or somehow hook-up other ad networks which will fill the space if there are no direct advertising clients.

The DFP solution does not have any integration with or plugin developed (that I can find) for WordPress so I'm having to plumb ad tags into headers, footers, page templates, sidebar widgets etc by hand. I'm also using custom short code sidebars to develop ad boxes for clients to be able to manage their ad codes within the content area themselves without having to go into php files directly, so it's still a lot to develop - even if the DFP Ad server itself is reasonably easy to get on top of.

Apologies if this had already been covered but I did not see it on a quick review above.

I am definitely + 1 for this development and all the good suggestions above. It is good to have alternative solutions and ones which can be applied for different level of client requirements, from enterprise down to small business sites. Anything which makes ad placement easy is a plus, and a back-end connection to other networks to fill "remnant" or unused space would be good.

It's also not easy to get Adsense approval - which you need to get access to DFP, so again something which goes towards this model but is more easily applied to WordPress is definitely a step in the right direction

Hopefully my inputs add to the conversation.

+1 for this plugin.

1) Will this be integrated with Pro Sites eventually?

2) Will be great if it goes in the directly like "AdSense" ... allowing anyone to click "Advertise Here", pay up and he/she can manage the text/banner ads all by themselves. Of course, it'll be even better admin gotta preview the ads before approving it to be displayed on the site.

In other words, work the plugin towards automated ad management for anyone using it to earn revenue from advertising.

quick skim to see what's all the hipe about!

looks like we're on a good ticket....

must admit though I'm a current openx user here, and generally would need a system that can match this in regards to general features before the switch.

however, I certainly would be keen on a development site for no other reason to play and offer any suggestions looks like fun and something to get me teeth into and would no doubt be suitable for most hard core wp users...

I do believe the feature of pushing txt (htnl) ads is a must, as mentioned in above comments, these are the cream of the crop these days for so many reasons.

shh! don't tell anyone but I have a bad habit of using the openx html ads for no other reason for tracking instant outgoing links, being supported with broadcast media and you have a great system for tracking navigation based on spots on broadcast services, something i don't believe google does.

might be a bit out of the scope here but neverless stresses the importance of txt based advertising with a system that can track instantly.

in the real world stats is $$, narrow band them and it's $$$$

anyhow just a thought!
Steve

This will be a great tool to have. Will start testing.

I installed on a non-MU site and do not see the menu for the settings and options in the admin interface.

Also, does it allow the advertiser to split test different zones?

Andrew

+1 for me too!

I was thinking about having an ad sharing feature/addon integrated within this plugin for sites where the ads will be enabled/or having the existing ad sharing plugin compatible with this one...

It's been 3 months since a new release, if it hasn't been cancelled, it surely doesn't look like it's been a priority.

Seems all updates / releases have significantly slowed down lately though?

Greetings :-)

its the Holidays!

It is obvious even to an Eastern European the reason for the slow down to include the anticipated release of WP 3.3 which certainly had to be dealt with.

I hope this project did not hit the cancellation bin.

Joe :-)

No, it hasn't been cancelled and should be along soon after the super duper membership plugin rewrite which is taking up the majority of my time at the moment :)

Good to hear and thanks for the update!