All account maintenance is handled through the ads_admin.pl script. To
access the administrative functions, load “ads_admin.pl?admin”. (The
QUERY_STRING addition — “?admin” — tells the script to let you access
the admin functions rather than merely the user info display functions.
If you simply load “ads_admin.pl” without the “?admin” addition, you’ll
only be given the users’ option to view a particular account.) Input
your administrative password, and you’ll be ready to go!

(The first time you access the admin page, you’ll be asked to
assign an administrative password. On future visits, you’ll need to
type that same password again, or you will be denied access.)

From the administrative page, you can add, edit or delete accounts, or
change your password. You can also create “groups” of accounts (not to
be confused with the “zones” explained below), which will simply allow
your advertisers to view the stats for all of their banners on a single
page.

When you add a new account to the list, you will be asked for quite a
few pieces of information. Most are optional; how (and how often) the
banner appears will be determined by what you input.

——————————————-

Name & E-Mail: The name and e-mail address of the advertiser or
exchange member. These are included for your reference only.

Start Day: If you so desire, you can have WebAdverts wait a certain
number of days before beginning to display the banner. If you don’t
input a value, displays will begin immediately.

Expiration: You can allow an account to run until it has been displayed
a certain number of times, until a certain number of people have
“clicked” on it, or until a certain number of days pass. Once the
banner has expired, it will no longer be shown in the rotation;
however, you *will* still have access to its statistics from the admin
page. No account information will be deleted by the script without
your specific instructions!

Display Ratio: If you’re setting up a “banner exchange” system, you’ll
probably want to define one or both of these variables instead of (or
in addition to) defining a set number of exposures. This tells the
script how often to display a banner based on how often the member
displays other banners on his own site. For example, a display ratio
of 2 tells the script to display the member’s banner once for each
two exposures that someone else gets on his site. A “click ratio” of
2 tells the script to display the member’s banner twice for each
click that he generates for someone else’s banner. (Your exchange
can utilize either or both methods of generating exposure credits.)
If a display and/or a “click” ratio are defined, the status displays
for the account will include HTML code which should be placed on the
member’s page to display banners. And yes, the script *does* check
to make sure that a member’s banner isn’t displayed on his own pages.
(Non-integer values are allowed, by the way, so if you wanted, for
example, for exchange members to earn two exposures for each three
displays — a 3:2 ratio — you could set this variable to 1.5.)

“Weight”: This setting influences how often a banner is displayed. If
you set the weight to “0″ the banner won’t be displayed at all. (This
can be handy if you set up an account before you’ve received payment
or before your customer’s requested start date, for example, or if you
want to take something out of the rotation on a temporary basis.) If
you set the weight to “1″ the banner will be displayed each time it
comes up in the normal rotation sequence. If you set it to higher
numbers, the banner will be displayed less often. (For example,
setting the weight to “2″ will cause the banner to be displayed every
other time it comes up in the rotation, setting it to “3″ will cause
it to be displayed every third time, etc.) You don’t necessarily need
to use the weight setting at all. It is primarily intended to allow
you to “push” certain advertisers’ banners more heavily than others.
Note that you must *always* have at least one account available with
a weight of 1 (and actually, generally, *most* of your accounts
should have a weight of 1). If you do not, you will find that on
some cycles, *no* banner will be available for display, and you’ll
end up with no banner at all on your page.

“Zone(s)”: The zone or zones (separated by spaces) in which you want
the advertisement to be shown. If you want it to be shown in all
zones, or if you aren’t using zones, simply leave it undefined. For
more information on zones, see below. (If you’ve defined the
@zones config variable, instead of a simple text box, you’ll see
two select boxes. One will allow you to select the zone or zones
in which the banner will be displayed, and the other will allow you
to select, if appropriate, the zone from which banners will be
displayed on the relevant exchange member’s pages.

Password: The password which will allow your client (from the main
ads_admin.pl page) to view the stats for his particular account.
DO NOT assign specific banners the same password that you use for
administrative functions!

Site URL: The URL address to which a user will be sent when the banner
is “clicked.” THIS IS OPTIONAL! By leaving this undefined, you can
easily create “display only” banners. The URL does not have to point
to an actual Web site, by the way; “mailto” URLs are also valid here.

Banner URL(s): The URL address or addresses for the banner(s) to be
displayed with the advertisement. You can optionally include more
than one banner, putting each URL on a separate line. If you do so,
each time the account is called in rotation, the script will randomly
determine which banner to actually display. Note that the banners
do *not* have to reside on your own server. So long as the URLs are
valid, it doesn’t make a bit of difference to the script where they
are located. (Of course, if you pull banners directly from exchange
members’ or advertisers’ sites, they are free to change their banners
whenever they like, without your knowledge.) If no banner is defined,
the script will assume that the account is for a remote “display
only” site. This allows you to set up exchanges similar to the
“Commonwealth Exchange” in which members on various sites all display
banners from paying advertisers rather than from each other.

Link Attributes: Any attributes which you want included in the
banner’s link tag. Unless you use frames on your site, you probably
won’t have much use for this, and can safely leave it undefined. If
however, you want a new browser window to open when the banner is
clicked, or if you have the banner inside frames and want to be sure
that the frames are removed from the destination page, define this
variable accordingly (with, for example, TARGET=”_top”). (If none of
that makes sense to you, you probably don’t need to worry about it.)

Banner Width & Height: The size (in pixels) of the banner to be
displayed. Defining these variables can make page display a bit
faster; however, they are not required. In fact, in certain
situations, you might *not* want to define them. For example, if
you simply load the banner from your advertiser’s server, it might be
changed without your specific knowledge, and the new banner might not
be the same size as the old one. Similarly, if you’ve defined several
banner URLs for the account, they might not all be the same size.

Border: The setting for the BORDER attribute of the banner’s IMG tag.
The default setting is 0, which will put no “link” border at all
around a banner. (On the one hand, some studies have indicated that
banners with borders tend to get slightly higher click-thru rates. On
the other hand, though, many banners are designed with borders as part
of the graphic image, anyway, and many administrators and advertisers
simply don’t like borders. So do as you will.)

ALT Text: The text you want to appear in place of the banner itself,
for the benefit of those who can’t or won’t load the image.

Link Text: Optional text which will appear either above or below the
banner, as you prefer.

“Raw” HTML: A way to override just about everything above, by actually
specifying the particular HTML code that WebAdverts should insert on
your pages. A complete discussion of “raw” mode appears elsewhere
in this document.

——————————————-

You also have the ability from the account add/edit page to reset the
start date, exposure count and click-thru count. This can be useful,
for example, if an account expires and is later renewed.

Finally, you also have the option to print out a simple list of the
names and e-mail addresses of all your advertisers or exchange members
(if you haven’t defined the $mailprog variable) or to actually send
an e-mail message directly to some or all of them. This can be useful,
for example, if you desire to send out a “mass mailing” to let all
your advertisers know about upgrades to your system.

Once you’ve set up a few accounts, of course, you’ll want to start
actually *displaying* banners. Otherwise, what good would the system
be?

To display banners on your pages, you have several options.

You can call banners via SSI tags, similar to the following:

<P ALIGN=CENTER><!–#exec cgi=”ads.pl”–></P>

When the page is parsed by the server, the tag will be replaced with
the appropriate banner and link. You will, of course, have to make
sure that the tag points to the correct location of the script on your
system. (If you’re unfamiliar with the use of SSI tags, you can find
more extensive information online in the WebAdverts FAQs file.)

SSI tags are no longer the preferred method of calling WebAdverts
banners, though, for several reasons. First, your pages have to be
set so that your server knows to parse them for SSI content, which
often means changing the names from “page.html” to “page.shtml,”
which is obviously undesirable when dealing with established pages
already in search engines and various bookmark files. Second, SSI
tags can only call scripts when the scripts and the pages are on the
same server (and usually only if they’re within the same domain),
which means they’re useless when dealing with a banner exchange, or
even just when trying to rotate banners across several realted sites.
Finally, SSI tags can’t pass “parameters” to the script, such as
zone specifications.

You can also call banners with IFRAME tags, similar to the following:

<!– Begin Banner Code –>
<P><CENTER>
<IFRAME src=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?iframe” MARGINWIDTH=0
MARGINHEIGHT=0 HSPACE=0 VSPACE=0 FRAMEBORDER=0 SCROLLING=NO WIDTH=468
HEIGHT=60>
<A href=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?banner=NonSSI;page=01″
TARGET=”_blank”><IMG src=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?page=01″
WIDTH=468 HEIGHT=60 ALT=”Click Here!” BORDER=0></A>
</IFRAME>
</CENTER>
<!– End Banner Code –>

Visitors using MSIE will see a banner displayed directly from your site,
through the frame “window” defined by the IFRAME tag. Visitors using
browsers (such as Netscape Navigator) which don’t support the IFRAME
tag, on the other hand, will see a banner displayed through the IMG tag
instead. Perhaps the biggest advantage of IFRAME tags is that they let
you set up (for MSIE users, at least) banners which refresh (reload) at
set intervals, for as long as a visitor remains on your page. Their
biggest disadvantage, of course, is that only MSIE users enjoy the
benefits.

New in version 3.00 is the ability to call banners — even “rich media”
and other “raw mode” banners — via simple JavaScript tags:

<!– Begin Banner Code –>
<P><CENTER>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript” src=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?jscript”>
</SCRIPT>
<NOSCRIPT>
<A href=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?banner=NonSSI;page=01″
TARGET=”_blank”><IMG src=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?page=01″
WIDTH=468 HEIGHT=60 ALT=”WebAdverts Demo” BORDER=0></A>
</NOSCRIPT>
</CENTER>
<!– End Banner Code –>

This doesn’t allow you to refresh banners on otherwise static pages,
but it does allow you to show just about anything to just about anyone.
(After all, the percentage of your visitors using browsers that don’t
support even simple JavaScript tags is likely to be *quite* small.)

Of course, it’s also possible to utilize both IFRAME tags *and*
JavaScript tags, for even greater reliability, as follows:

<!– Begin Banner Code –>
<P><CENTER>
<IFRAME src=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?iframe” MARGINWIDTH=0
MARGINHEIGHT=0 HSPACE=0 VSPACE=0 FRAMEBORDER=0 SCROLLING=NO WIDTH=468
HEIGHT=60>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript” src=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?jscript”>
</SCRIPT>
<NOSCRIPT>
<A href=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?banner=NonSSI;page=01″
TARGET=”_blank”><IMG src=”http://foo.com/ads.pl?page=01″
WIDTH=468 HEIGHT=60 ALT=”WebAdverts Demo” BORDER=0></A>
</NOSCRIPT>
</IFRAME>
</CENTER>
<!– End Banner Code –>

Of course, if all else fails, you can call banners via simple, basic
IMG tags:

<A href=”ads.pl?banner=NonSSI;page=01″><IMG src=”ads.pl?page=01″></A>

You can “fancy it up” however you like; just make sure that both the
link and the image call point to the correct config file, that the
“?banner=NonSSI” is tacked on to the end of the link address and that
both the link and image address include the (same) “page=” identifier.

However, such tags will not allow you to show anything other than simple
GIF or JPEG graphics. And more importantly, visitors viewing your pages
with MSIE are almost certain to occasionally be directed to incorrect
pages (or to error messages) when they click on banners, thanks to the
fact that MSIE often caches (even though it shouldn’t) CGI-generated
images.