Advertising Module
Well, it has been a while since my last posting to this blog. Part of the reason for that is that I have been extremely busy getting the advertising for our website put into place. Since the launch of our new site in February, we have been slowly adding functionality that we need. In this case, it is our advertising module.
For the web developers out there, this one was kind of a monumental task. We developed a custom system that allows us to upload ads to the website, target those adds to specific zones, and also track the performance of those ads. Each of our zones will randomly serve out an ad assigned to it (given that there are more than 1 assigned to that zone). In addition, each time an ad is displayed on the website, the users IP address is checked and the database is updated to reflect the total number of impressions as well as the number of unique impressions. The same is true when a user clicks on an ad, the system will track total clicks and unique clicks based on IP address.
And the icing on the cake is that each advertiser is given a username and password to login to our reporting section for their advertising account. Once logged in, our advertisers can select one of their ads to receive a custom report on the impressions and clicks for their ad. This little beauty was the idea of Kerry and Todd, and I think that it will really help out our advertisers.
While most people won't care, this blog gives me the opportunity to thank the people at the magazine that helped me with this, as well as to express how proud I am of the system that we have all conceived. Our site is becoming a really useful tool for us, due mostly to great planning by our team and by custom building the functionality that we need.
