Some of the most popular creative files come as image banners and Flash banners. These are often displayed as ads on a webpage that a user can click on to be redirected to the offer landing page. This is also an ideal process for uploading creatives on your partner’s behalf if they want to use their creatives.
To add a banner, go to Offers > Creative Files and click Add Creatives. On the next page, select the offer(s) you want to add the banner to. Next, choose “Image banner” or “Flash banner” from the Type dropdown. When you choose the image banner type, the system will determine what the dimensions are and use the file name as the creative name automatically. If you are uploading a Flash banner, you will have to type in the width and height dimensions since the application cannot determine what the dimensions are by using the file metadata like it can with the image banner:
When uploading the file to the application, you can use either GIF, JPG, JPEG, or PNG files for image banners. Flash files can only be uploaded in SWF format. Any other format causes an error when the system checks for the appropriate file format.
Note: File names cannot have spaces in them. If you want to have spaces in the file name, replace the space with an underscore ( _ ) or a hyphen ( – ), and that will suffice.
Once the file has been selected and uploaded to the application, the page will show a progress bar showing the upload progress. When completed, you will see the file URL in your platform CDN, showing that the creative is active:
Uploading Multiple Files & to Multiple Offers
One trick that the application has but doesn’t show is the ability to upload multiple creative files and upload to multiple offers at the same time. For example, you have a creative file that you want to upload to a set of five offers. In the add creative process, select each offer using Ctrl + Click each offer in the select box (or Command + Click on Mac). This will allow you to add the creative to each selected offer.
What will happen when you do this is the system will create a creative file for each offer, so in the example of uploading one creative file to five offers, this will upload the creative five times to the application. This is because the system associates a creative file with a single offer, and to do this, the creative file has to be duplicated for each offer.
If you want to upload multiple creatives to the same offer (or multiple offers), select multiple files in the file picker to upload by using Ctrl (command on Mac). Once the files have been selected, the system will upload all of them simultaneously.
Generating Ad Tag Code
Once you upload images or Flash creatives to the desired offers, you can generate an ad tag code for your partner to place on their web pages.
To do so, first, go to the offer’s page and find the Generate Tracking panel. Select a partner like you would when generating a tracking link for that partner. Then, select the desired creative from the Creative dropdown menu. You can then provide the code that appears to your partners for this creative.
Like any standard tracking link, you can add sub IDs, source IDs, deep links, direct links, and other parameters to the ad tag code. The image pixel at the end of the HTML ad tag is added automatically so that the banner can track impressions.
Having Redirect Load in the Same Browser Window
By default, your creatives will load in a new browser window or tab. This is done in the anchor link tag and is specified with the target=”_blank” attribute. Remove that, and the redirect will take place in the same window.
To set this up, you can create an HTML creative using code that looks something like this:
<a href="{tracking_link}" ><img src="LINK_TO_CREATIVE_URL" height="FILE_HEIGHT" width="FILE_WIDTH" border="0" /></a>
Flash Files
Below are a couple of options for enhancing your Flash file creatives:
By default, TUNE includes clickTag and clickTAG as flashvars. The value for both variables is an encoded version of the tracking link. If your banner files use different variables, you can specify them in the Flash Vars input box when adding a creative file.
For example, the advertiser sends you Flash banners, and they use the variable “TrackingLink” in the Flash file. Include this variable in the Flash Vars box along with the encoded tracking link macro:
TrackingLink={etracking_link}
Inserting Tracking URLs Into Flash
The creative manager assumes Flash banners are IAB compliant and use the clickTAG variable.
The clickTAG= parameter dynamically passes a click-through URL to a Flash movie as a “key value” using a GET method (within the URL). Many ad-serving companies use it. A sample code to insert into a Flash banner is below.
{getURL(clickTAG,"_blank");}
The variable clickTag is also passed into the Flash file.
If you don’t use the standard IAB variable with TAG capitalized in clickTAG, the lowercase version of clickTag will also work.
Below is a sample of the code used to display Flash files that show how both clickTAG and clickTag are passed into Flash files.
<param name="flashvars" value="clickTag=http%3A%2F%2Fdemo.go2cloud.org%2Faff_c%3Foffer_id%3D1%26aff_id%3D1%26file_id%3D4&clickTAG=http%3A%2F%2Fdemo.go2cloud.org%2Faff_c%3Foffer_id%3D1%26aff_id%3D1%26file_id%3D4" />