Banner Ad Management in Ruby/Rails?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

Does anyone know of a plugin or gem for banner ad rotation management? Something inthe vein of PhpAds. I've searched and searched and come up with nothing. I thought I'd check here before I "roll my own".

Any tips from others who have done this?

Thanks! -Chad

2

We didn't find anything, so ended up rolling our own.

What we did was have partials for the ad types we wanted and then had a db entry system to enter in a block of html and assign it an ad type, priority and expire date. We also added code that if it found multiple ads of the same type and priority that it would randomize which one it displays.

Ray PopCurrent.com

3

Thanks!

Did you also add ad-view "clickthru" tracking? This is the part I have no idea how to do....

The site I'm working on redesigning (from php to RoR) currently has phpads, and has paid advertisers that rely on stats to see how effective their ads are.

4

Thanks!

Did you also add ad-view "clickthru" tracking? This is the part I have no idea how to do....

Point the banner at your app, e.g. link_to <banner>, :controller => "banner", :action => "click", :id => @banner.id ...

Have the click action register the click somehow, then redirect_to whatever url the banner should take one too.

Isak

5

The site I'm working on redesigning (from php to RoR) currently has phpads, and has paid advertisers that rely on stats to see how effective their ads are.

Why not keep using phpads? It works well, is a known quantity and can be easily integrated into Rails. We wrote a little helper method "render_banner()" that you can pass a size, zone, refresh, etc to that works very nicely. One of the nice things about it is that we wrap the whole banner into an iframe so it protects our site from those HTML banners that blow the page to pieces.

If you're interested let me know and I can dig it up...

6

We didn't track ads, since most of the ads were from ad services not our own but its probably a good idea :wink: Isak's email about how to track seems like a solid solution.