HasOffers Documentation

Introduction

The HasOffers Ad Manager is a complete ad serving solution. It’s not just another banner rotator, but a comprehensive solution for managing advertisements.

Easily create a banner or text advertisement campaign. Add creatives already assigned to offers or upload new creatives on-the-fly. Add an unlimited number of creatives and offer combinations to a campaign. Multiple offers with different geo-location targeting can be added to create a campaign with worldwide coverage. Utilize advanced optimization algorithms to automatically optimize each campaign for maximum results. Networks can generate ad tag code for affiliates or enable affiliates to generate their own ad tag code.

The HasOffers Ad Manager combines the best performance tracking features with an industry-leading ad serving solution. This document provides a thorough explanation of each feature within the Ad Manager, providing you and your affiliates with all the documentation you need to experience the Ad Manager at its full potential.

Manage Campaigns

The Ad Manager is available to all HasOffers clients, and can be found in the application as a separate tab. The Manage Campaigns page is your main dashboard for viewing all of the campaigns that have been created. From this page you can view and update your campaigns, with a default view of “active” campaigns. You also have the option to view paused and deleted campaigns. The screen capture below shows a typical Manage Campaigns page that network employees can access.

Create Campaign

The Create Campaign page allows you to create two types of campaigns with the Ad Manager: banner campaigns and text campaigns. Start by specifying a name for your new campaign.

Banner campaigns are made up of rich media files. Banner campaigns require a specific height and width for each. This height and width is used in the ad tag code and determines the display size of creatives that appear for that campaign.only JavaScript. Text campaigns are very similar to Google AdWords/AdSense text units.

Status allows you to organize and control access to a campaign. Campaigns are active by default. Paused and deleted campaigns are not displayed by default on the Manage Campaigns page. Set a campaign to deleted to remove it from the drop down menus and reports.

The ad server technology used by the Ad Manager contains built in optimization algorithms that maximize campaign results. Campaign optimization displays the highest performing creatives more frequently based on the method selected. Optimize the campaign by maximizing Click through Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate (CR), Revenue per Click (RPC), Revenue per Thousand Impressions (RPM) and Profit.

Disabling this feature will display all creatives in a campaign equally. The performance of each creative is available in reporting. More information about this is available in the section entitled Campaign Optimization.

Allow affiliates to advertise any campaign you create by giving them access. More information about this is available in the section entitled Affiliate Access.

Campaign View

After you create a campaign, you can view it from the Manage Campaigns page by clicking on the campaign name. The campaign view page allows you to update the campaign settings, add creatives and generate the ad tag code.

The campaign view page lists all the creatives added to a particular campaign, and shows active creatives by default. You can have a mixture of different creative types in a single banner campaign (text campaigns only allow text creatives). As you can see in the screen capture below, each creative is associated with a specific offer and corresponding offer URL. You can add an unlimited number of creative, offer and offer URL combinations in a single campaign.

To achieve worldwide coverage with a single campaign, simply add creatives for offers that target all the countries for which you want to display advertisements. If you want the campaign to display advertisements in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, you will need to add creatives for offers that target that geo location. If a creative is added for an offer that has all countries / regions selected (no specific geo location targeting), then the creative linked to that offer will be displayed for all users.

Add Existing Creatives

You can easily add creatives for offers that are already loaded in the creative manager to a campaign by using the top Add Existing Creative box on the Add Creative page. The link for Add Creative is at the top right of the creatives box on the campaign view page.

Start by selecing the offer from which you want to choose a creative. Select the offer URL you want to direct users to and select from one of the available creatives. To see a preview of the available creatives click Browse All. For banner campaigns, only creatives with the same size (height and width) as the campaign can be added to the drop down menu. For text campaigns, only text creatives are listed in the drop down menu. Once you have selected the offer / offer URL / creative combination, click Add Existing Creative.

Add New Creatives

You can also easily add new creatives for offers and load them simultaneously into a campaign. At the bottom of Add Creative page, there is a box for Add a New Creative. Start by selecting the offer you desire to link the new creative to and select the appropriate offer URL. Specify a name for this new creative. This name will be displayed in the creative manager as well as to your affiliates if they have access to the campaign.

For banner campaigns, you can add three different types of creatives: image banner, flash banner and HTML ad. If image banner is selected, you will need to specify a valid image file in gif, jpg, jpeg, or png format. If flash banner is selected, you will need to specific a valid swf file to upload along with the height and width. Files sizes for image banners and flash banners must be under 100 KBS. If a HTML ad is selected, you will need to specify the height and width of the creative, and then enter HTML into the code box. To enable the banner to be clickable and tracked in the system, you will need to use {tracking_link} as the link value in your code. The ad server will replace {tracking_link} with the appropriate affiliate tracking link dynamically when it is displayed.

Cost, Revenue and Profit

The Ad Manager calculates cost, revenue and profit based on the offers loaded into the campaign. Since creatives are linked to offers and then added to campaigns, the corresponding revenue and cost is used to track performance. Offers can be set to cost per action (CPA), cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). To pay publishers on a strictly CPM basices, only add creatives for CPM offers to a campaign. Add a mixture of creatives from CPM, CPC and CPA offers to let your selected optimization algorithm maximize the campaign’s results.

To view Campaign stats, click on the View Campaign Stats link from a view campaign page. Or go to the Custom Stat Report and group by campaign and/or creative. While the campaign “Entertainment Websites 300x250” illustrated above had more creatives than listed below, only United States traffic was sent to the campaign and thus only banners for US offers were displayed.

Campaign Ad Tag Code

The Ad Tag Code needs to be placed by you or your affiliates on web applications, blogs or websites to display advertisements. The code is linked to a specific campaign and only displays active creatives loaded in that particular campaign. Each time an advertisement is displayed, it is tracked as an impression. Each click on an advertisement is tracked as a click.

If you are a network employee, start by selecting the affiliate to auto-generate the specific ad tag code for that affiliate. Then select the format. The iFrame format displays advertisements inside an iFrame. The Facebook iFrame format generates the ad tag code for displaying advertisements on Facebook, and the JavaScript format creates the ad tag code to render the advertisements and display them with JavaScript. IFrame is the most common and recommended format.

To enable affiliates (publishers) to track clicks on their third-party systems and set their own cookies for tracking, a Click Redirect must be created. A click redirect works by HasOffers first recording a click and then sending the user to the affiliate’s click redirect link so they can track a click and set a cookie if needed. The destination offer URL is appended to the end of the affiliate’s Click Redirect link. After the affiliates system is done tracking, they must take the link sent to them and redirect the user to the destination offer URL.

For example, a Click Redirect is set to: http://www.yourtracking.com/?url= . The HasOffers system will append the offer URL of http://www.myfuncards.com to the end of the Click Redirect http://www.yourtracking.com/?url=http://www.myfuncards.com . If the affiliates tracking page requires the destination offer URL to be URL encoded, then check the box for encode click redirect which will use the variable of “eredirect” in the src of the ad tag code, representing encoded Click Redirect instead of just “redirect” which will pass a non-encoded destination offer URL.

To further illustrate the above, consider a user that sees a banner and clicks on it. They are sent to a HasOffers tracking link http://demo.go2jump.org/aff_c?offer_id=5&aff_id=3&url_id=0. The user is then redirected to http://www.yourtracking.com/?url=http://www.myfuncards.com. The affiliate completes their tracking and then sends the user to http://www.myfuncards.com.

Campaign Optimization

Campaign optimization displays the highest performing creative file based on a selected algorithm. Disabling this feature will display campaign creatives equally. The performance of each creative is available in reporting. Optimization can be enabled on a campaign to maximize Click through Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate (CR), Revenue per Click (RPC), Revenue per Thousand Impressions (RPM) or Profit. The optimization code analyzes hourly statistics for the past seven days.

The optimization code takes into account two pools of creatives: creatives with less than two conversions and creatives with more. Creatives with less than two conversions are not assigned a weight. This pool of creatives with no weights is displayed for 10% of all impressions. Creatives with more than two conversions are assigned a weight based on their performance.

This pool of banners with weights (proven creatives) is displayed for 90% of all impressions. Creative weights are values that take into account the optimization algorithm selected. If Revenue per Thousand Impressions is selected, creatives with the highest RPMs have highest weights and are displayed more frequently than banners with lower RPMs.

Affiliate Access

Instead of just creating Ad Tag Code in your network interface, empower affiliates to view the campaigns you have already created. You can enable affiliates to have access to each campaign. If you enable affiliate access, an Ad Manager tab will appear in the affiliate interface. They will then be able to view the campaigns. Below is a screen shot of what an affiliate sees for a campaign they have permission to access.

Affiliate Ad Manager

Affiliates are also empowered to create their own campaigns using offers and creatives loaded in your network. By default this preferences is turned on. This can be disabled in the Customize Application section, on the Affiliate Settings page.