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Finding an Ad Management System? 30

Posted by Cliff from the putting-the-bacon-on-the-table dept.
aagha asks: "I'm working for a very small, three-person startup in Athens, Greece (with a dwindling budget), trying to create the first real, full-featured tourism website for this country. While we have our home-grown Java-based Content Management System up and running and our site working fairly smoothly, we're having one heck of a time finding an ad management system to to work with our system. We have URL's which contain params to build our pages dynamically and we can't find a solution to work with our JSP's to serve ads targeted by category and or article. I know that I'm not the only person writing software for a JSP site (uhhh, or am I?). I'm curious to know what others have done to meet their advertisement serving needs."
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Finding an Ad Management System? More

Finding an Ad Management System?

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  • Params - noooooooo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2002 @05:54AM (#4657810) Journal
    not search engine friendly

    spider :
    http://website/makepage.x?page=1 : ok
    http://website/makepage.x?page=2 : skipping - repeat
    http://website/makepage.x?page=3 : skipping - repeat
    http://website/makepage.x?page=4 : skipping - repeat

  • maybee (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13, 2002 @06:19AM (#4657861)
    SELECT * FROM ads_live WHERE page_id=[page_ref] OR cat_id=[category_ref];

    joined with the ads table of course ;)

  • try looking at web pages (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2002 @06:20AM (#4657864) Journal
    mostly people seem to use javascript these days

    That way the pages themselves can be cached / static and the ads rotate themselves.
    This also helps with tracking as the script that generates the javascript can log the ads.

    Generating traffic via search engines is important.
    Your URL scheme is an important consideration.
    I use mod_perl to take the url and set environment variables which then tell the page generation code which page to generate. Similar to having a query string but my pages are called comething nice like

    http://www.thebigchoice.com/Graduate_Jobs/Teleco mm unications/Nutts_Corner/

    rather than

    http://www.thebigchoice.com/jobsearch.php?discip li neID=5&region=7

    • Another way to do it is IFRAMEs. They're not entirely cross-browser, of course, but you can put non-IFRAME code into the <IFRAME>...</IFRAME> area as a backup. That way, you can just call an external script or whatever, and rotate that separately.

      I have no idea if this helps you at all, but hey.

      --Dan

  • What ever you find (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    *please* make sure that the ad management system silently manages to remove popups, and limits all animations to at most one iteration. May hurt your advertising, but will please your users.
    • Silent remove popups, my good chum, and you silently lose your advertisers. And as the advertisers go, so does the project.

      This is the inherent problem with Free-as-in-Beer projects -- how the heck do you pay for them? After all, even if you work for free, bandwidth still costs money at the very least. Ideals are one thing, and to be respected, but so is the drive to eat and pay the rent.

      Popups do suck, and I do hate 'em, but you hafta understand that for a lot of people they are one of the only game in town to finance our little ideas. Advertising execs may not understand that POPUPS DO NOT WORK, but that doesn't stop them from shelling out untold millions on them.

      However, there is the concept of a happy media. On my multi-million-hits-a-month site (non-linkage intentional), the idea is simple -- I only get paid for for each IP unique view once every 24 hours. My solution? Only show that IP an ad once every 24 hours. Yes, that means that the users have to close a popup the first time they visit me a day, but it also means that they only have to close that popup once a day. Not a perfect solution, but I haven't yet found a better alternative yet (except for these textads things, they seem to be picking up as of late)
  • This fine chap is looking for ad rotation code which uses demographics, personalized content info, region targeting, etc. to SERVE ADS to his viewers.

    So try to stick to providing details on OSS initiatives in Java or similar OO languages which does the forementioned.

    Personally, I'm not sure if I want businesses to have really good OSS Ad serving software but if you're gonna do it at least do it OSS so the rest of us can put together great commerce sites as well.

  • OASIS (Score:3, Informative)

    by bencc99 ( 100555 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2002 @08:40AM (#4658154) Homepage
    I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but OASIS [sourceforge.net] is an incredibly flexible ad management system. I've not used it in production (management decision), but in testing it showed itself up fairly well. It's fast, reliable, and has some excellent ad/sponsor management features.
    • jsp is not php. Badly programmed jsp won't work. Badly programmed php will work on the developers machine and crash everybody elses browser...

      OASIS won't do. The guy is looking for a jsp solution.
      • We're finding ourselves in a position where PHP seems to be the only solution out there--something I find amazingly bizarre.

        JSP _is_ the way we want to go, but I don't see ANY alternatives out there as of yet(hmmm, new Sourceforge project?).

        We've looked at solutions like AdJuggler.com, adservingsolutions.com, but no one but no one can handle dynamic pages!
        • If OASIS is good it should be reasonably easy to take it appart and recode in JSP.

          And put in Postgresql as the backend of course =:-D
          • I was hoping for a solution I can roll out with our launch in a week. You think I'll be able to get that done in a week? ;-)
            • Not this week!

              I have my first full month of work in quite a while...

            • Re:OASIS (Score:5, Informative)

              by Yuan-Lung ( 582630 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2002 @12:09PM (#4659983)
              When I built the ad management system on our JSP community site, we were quiet pressed for time, so I just went for the simplest solution I could think of.

              I threw the list of banners into a table, along with the chance of showing and statistics, then I insert into the pages a javascript that randomly pulls a banner according to that statistics each time a banner is displayed. I tracked the banner display counts as they are requested. For tracking the clicking, I just used a JSP page to forward the users after they click on the banner before sending them to the real URL.

              I was able to implement and test this in a few days... Or is this not what you were looking for?

              • Re:OASIS (Score:2, Informative)

                by aagha ( 130742 )
                This is indeed an option I've considered and one we might implement if we get extremely pressed for time and need to have a system up--right now, we have the luxury of a couple of weeks; we can launch (in Beta) without a system in place.

                However, long-run, we need a much more robust solution where we can target at the category and a content level, gather stats, create campaigns, experation dates, etc...

                I'm hesitant to introduce PHP (most systems seem to be running MySQL) as we're JSP on Postgres, and I don't wan't to add 2 more (big) things to have to worry about. But seeing how all the robust solutions out there ARE in PHP, I'm starting to become curious how JSP and PHP would cohabitate.
  • phpAdsNew (http://www.phpadsnew.com [phpadsnew.com]) is very feature-rich and fast. It also can serve banners over XML-RPC so you could hook it up to your JSP CMS.

    It supports keywords/categories, zones, all banner sizes (including popups and floating layers), geotargetting, etc.

    • It's a shame that it isn't .JSP based, or it might be of some relevance here.
      • XML-RPC _is_ an interesting option though! I've posted on the "General" forum for the phpAdsNew project on Sourceforge, and there's a discussion going on thre (see subject: JSP and XML).
  • You could try engage softwares admanager. We used it at a company I worked at and it was okay. It had a system to enter in the ad and then there were ad calls and an API so that we could extend it. We had a dynamic system as well so this worked okay. Also you could use doubleclick like many smaller companies do. It depends on how many ads you want to display.

    Url is here -> http://www.engage.com/uk/products/admanager/defaul t.htm

    • I've filled in DoubleClick's form for a sales rep to contact me two times. They've not. Their sales guys must be soooo busy, that they have to turn away busines...
      • which is why I suggested engage...

        Alternately you could build your own system. You need a place to store the images, a place to store the html templates for the images / ads, and then a template processor. Also a counter. The web logs will actually tell you most of the information if you use apache. Apache logs will tell you the image that was loaded and the page requests. You'd have to then parse them.

        Seriously look at engage.com and see if there is soimething there that you could use.

  • There are listings for 5 different apps - some commercial, some free...

    http://www.hotscripts.com/Java/JSP_and_Servlets/Ad _Management/ [hotscripts.com]
    • I've seen this, thx.

      AdJuggler - Spoke to sales and tech reps; Can't do what we need; can't handle dynamic pages.

      AdServer Solutions - I asked the guy if they can handle our situation. He said, "We can do that." I asked for documentation. He said, "We have alot of people that do this. We do not have any information laid out but will provide this when you are using it". Uhhh, I don't think so...

      AdRevolver -- Talking to them right now. They DO seem to be willing to provide the effort to try to make this work, but things are in early stage right now.
  • We've been using adcycle [adcycle.com] for few years now with large number of sites/campaigns.

    It is not free, but the price is not too high and most(all?) of the code comes with source.

    It also comes with optional daemon that really helps to reduce load from the database.
    • AdCycle is interesting indeed, but poses the dual problem of being PHP based and running on MySql. I'm willing to take on this extra burden if I _have_ to, but first need to know if it can solve my problem.

      On the Adcycle.com forum, I posted [adcycle.com] [Adcycle.com forum] my specific problem a few days back and it seems to be the only posting up there without a single reply.

      Until I know Adcycle can handle an issue like this, I don't have the cycles needed to research it more in depth.

      Thanks for the suggestion though!

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