Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Monday, November 10, 2008

Google Ad Manager

So I work for a company that needed an ad server and I came across Google Ad Manager. It's great. No installation needed and it worked wonderfully! We were using OpenAds, but that doesn't work well. We were having unique errors and the people are overseas and were super hard to get a hold of when we needed them. Below is some beginning knowledge on this that I learned within the first day or two. Any questions, please feel free to comment.

Inventory

Once you log into Adm Manager you’ll notice four tabs at the top labeled Order, Inventory, Reports, and Admin. First lets focus on the Inventory tab. This is where you’ll set up you actual available ad slots for your website.

Click ‘Inventory’

Click ‘New Ad Slot’

Name your ad slot something descriptive like, RightColumnTop125×125. This name cannot contain any spaces. Select the size of the ads that will be displayed in this slot and fill in an optional description. You can uncheck ‘Allow AdSense ads to compete for remnant inventory’ because these are your own inhouse ads and they aren’t costing you anything, therefore it wouldn’t make sense for adspeed to compete with your own ads. Don’t worry about placements yet. We’ll get to that.

Scroll to the bottom and click Save

Placements

Now lets create a placement. Placements are groups of ad slots put together. Lets say you have one ad slot named RightColumnTop125×125 and another named RightColumnBottom125×125. You could group these two together in a placement called ‘Right Column’. Placements are useful for reporting purposes and for specifying where our creatives (our actual ads) will show up.

Click ‘Placements’

Click ‘New Placement’

Enter a name and again uncheck ‘Allow Google advertisers to target’ since these are for our inhouse ads. Below you’ll see your ad slots. ad the relevant ad slots to the placement.

Scroll to the bottom and click Save

Orders

Lets head over to the Orders section. This is where we’ll actually upload our ads.

Click ‘Orders’

Click ‘New Order’

Fill out all the fields. For Order Name put something like ‘You Company inhouse ads’. Don’t worry about external ID for now. Make sure to set end date to unlimited.

Click the ‘Advertiser’ drop down menu

Create a new advertiser with your company name

Click Save

Orders -> Line Items

Next we’ll create our line items. I like to think of line items like categories for our order. For example if you’re order may be for Toyota Cars, and your line item would be ‘Toyota Corolla’. This is important because you can only apply targeting (which we’ll get into in another article) at the line level. Inside the line we’ll place our actual ads.

Click ‘New line item’

You should be getting good at filling out these forms by now. On this page ‘Delivery Priority’ is the key field. Make sure to set it to ‘House’. This will allow you to set an unlimited end date. Also your start date must be in the future.

Below you’ll see our placements. Select which placement you want this line item to display your ads.

Scroll down and you’ll see targeting. This allows you to target your line item to specific countries, browsers, day and time, or even bandwidth. I’ll get more into the advanced features of targeting in another article.

Below targeting you can set your ‘Delivery Options’. I set Delivery rate and Creative Rotation to ‘even’ and left the other boxes unchecked.

Click Save

Orders -> Line Items -> Upload Creative

You should see a link that says ‘Needs Creatives’ in the status menu. Click this link and now we’ll upload our actual ads.

This next screen is pretty self explanatory. You can name your ad and choose the correct ad slot size. You can use flash or static images. You can even insert your own code under ‘Rich Media’. For most of you you’ll probably have a static image or flash file. If you’ve already uploaded your image/flash to a server choose ‘Standard image redirect’ or ‘Flash media redirect’ and you can put the appropriate link to the actual file. You can also specify where you want the ad to link. Manual weight will be grayed out because we’ve selected even distribution for this ad slot.

Click Save

Generate HTML

Now all we need it the actual HTML to place on our web page. Head back over to ‘Inventory’ and click ‘Generate sample HTML’. Select which ad slots you want to generate code for and click ‘Generate Sample HTML’.

The Generated HTML will show up below and you’ll notice that it’s a complete web page with head and body tags. Just copy and paste the javascript in and your done.

Remember your ads will not show up until they reach the begin date for you line item. Even then it can take 10min to an hour for Google’s cache to update itself so be patient. You’ll know everything is good when you go to your order page and see the status set to ‘Delivering’.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions please feel free to comment below.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Google's New Browser

Yet another browser for us to test our web sites in.... See below what the Google Blog says:

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We'll post an update here as soon as it's ready.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Flash Web Site About to Become Google / Yahoo Searchable!

I just found this article by SchoolOfFlash.com and they said the following. How exciting!!

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For years, the advice has always been that if you want good search engine results, then you don’t want to create your website entirely with Flash, because search engines have no way of effectively indexing swf files. Well, all of that is about to change.

Adobe, Google, and YahooAdobe just announced that they are teaming up with Google and Yahoo in order to address this issue. Adobe has supplied these search industry leaders with technology that will allow them to index swf files in a way that has never been possible before. In fact, Google has already started implementing this technology, and as I understand it, Yahoo won’t be too far behind.

“But wait,” you say. “I thought search engines already had a way to index swf files.”

Well, you’re right, but up until now, they could only index the static information and static links within your swf file. With this new technology, even the dynamic content of your Flash files will be open to search engine indexing, making it infinitely more possible for your all-Flash website to achieve top rankings in search engine results.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Free Money Donations from Google for Non-Profits

Google's the man! or da company if you will :)

Check this out if you are a non-profit and would like to receive donations from people for your organization for free!

Check this out: http://checkout.google.com/seller/npo/

The will have this for free until 2009 so take advantage of it!!

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Add A Search Engine to your Site - Google

Rob Buckley shows you how to make your sitey the sharpest search engine of them all using Google’s Co-op technology. The secret behind it? Refinement and customisation

When you think of searching, more often than not, you think of Google. It has even become a verb, despite the best attempts of its legal department to prevent it – have you ‘Googled’ someone today? But it has become much more than just a web search engine. Because you can now embed it into your website, it’s also an easy way to add a search facility to your pages.

The ability to use Google as a site search engine has been around for a while now, and is reasonably common. As long as Google can access all the pages on your site and it updates its indexes as often as you update your pages, it’s a great, hassle-free and cheap tool to make your site’s content available to visitors, whether you’re using static pages or a Content Management System.

But recently, Google created a new version of its “embeddable” search engine. As well as being customisable so that it matches your site’s look and feel, Google’s Co-op custom search engine can be set to search a list of sites as well as your own, or it can search the whole web. You can also preload it with search terms so that it favours particular kinds of searches. If your site is about karate, for example, and someone searches for “belt”, the results of the search can favour karate belts, rather than those available from Marks & Spencer.


About the author:

Name: Rob Buckley
Site: www.the-word-is-not-enough.com
Areas of expertise: XHTML, PHP and MySQL
If I were a kitchen implement… I’d definitely be a whisk

Click here to download tutorial PDF