Finding an Ad Management System? 30
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."
Params - noooooooo (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Params - noooooooo (Score:2)
--Dan
maybee (Score:3, Insightful)
joined with the ads table of course ;)
try looking at web pages (Score:5, Insightful)
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/Telec
rather than
http://www.thebigchoice.com/jobsearch.php?disci
Re:try looking at web pages (Score:2)
I have no idea if this helps you at all, but hey.
--Dan
What ever you find (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What ever you find (Score:1)
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)
hmmm so far they're missing the point (Score:2)
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)
Re:OASIS (Score:2)
OASIS won't do. The guy is looking for a jsp solution.
Re:OASIS (Score:1)
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!
Re:OASIS (Score:1)
And put in Postgresql as the backend of course =:-D
Re:OASIS (Score:1)
Re:OASIS (Score:1)
I have my first full month of work in quite a while...
Re:OASIS (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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 (Score:1)
It supports keywords/categories, zones, all banner sizes (including popups and floating layers), geotargetting, etc.
Great! (Score:1)
Re:Great! (Score:1)
use engage (Score:2)
Url is here -> http://www.engage.com/uk/products/admanager/defaul t.htm
Re:use engage (Score:1)
Re:use engage (Score:2)
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.
Check this site... (Score:2)
http://www.hotscripts.com/Java/JSP_and_Servlets/A
Re:Check this site... (Score:1)
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.
adcycle (Score:1)
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.
Re:adcycle (Score:1)
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!