Banners:Zones

Zones are the actual real estate on the page that can display banner campaigns. Zones must be created here in banner management AND set up in at least one page template in order to display. The zone will display banners that are assigned to the zone’s selected campaigns. The banners will either rotate within the page or between pages depending on the rotation interval setting.

Creating a new zone

Add a new zone by selecting ‘add zone’ from the banner search tool (note that the zone needs to be set up in a page template before it will appear on the site). Edit or delete a zone by first looking it up by entering applicable keywords and selecting ‘zone’ from the “search by” drop down.

The zone form consists of meta, behavioral and relationship information. The fields are below:

• Zone name: sets the name that will appear when the zone qualifies for a search in the banner search tool.
• Notes: internal details / notes about the campaign
• Active: Specifies if the zone can be displayed or not. If deactivated, the zone will not display in any of the page templates it is set up within.
• Rotation Delay: Controls banner rotation within a page by setting the number of seconds each qualifying banner will display before ‘rotating’ to the next banner in the line up. Leaving this field empty will make the qualifying banners locate ‘between’ pages, by selecting one banner at random (effected by weighting) to appear in the zone when the page is loaded. Each page load will randomly select and display a different qualifying banner.
• Campaigns: selects the campaigns that will participate in the zone. The weighting dictates the odds of the campaign being randomly selected vs other campaigns in the zone (once a campaign is selected, the banner weighting in the campaign is then used to select the banner to display). Weighting only applies if the zone is set to rotate banners between pages (randomly selected banner appears as each page is loaded, but remains in the page), not within pages (all qualifying banners rotate at a set interval while the page is being viewed). Note that a campaign must have a weight of 1 or the system will drop the campaign from the zone.

Note that the zone must contain at least one campaign that contains at least one banner, and all four elements (banner advertiser, banner, campaign and zone) must be active for the zone to display. Also the zone must be set up in at least one page template to display.

Setting a zone to display in a page template

For the zone to display, it must be called from within a page template. Page templates should only be managed by integrators familiar with HTML and PHP. Use the displayBannerZone function to retrieve the html to display the banner, than echo the returned html at the point(s) in the page template the zone should appear.

<<Back to Banners