rADmin: Making Your Ads Rad

"This post and accompanying walkthrough video focus on setting up and managing ads through Radmin. If you haven’t done so already, check out this post first for an introduction to Radmin."

The ads section of Radmin is here, and while we can toss around a bunch of reasons why it's a great leap forward, we'll instead just let you know it single-handedly cures a whole bunch of headaches of the old ad system. Things like advertisers not always being keen on staying associated with ads. Or the dreaded error message from adjusting weights. ALL GONE.

In the old system's place, we've created a robust platform for ad creation, management, and reporting. We can go on and on about why it's great, but here to do the honors himself is Justin Schaffer, the man behind the design, the Legend of DoStuff. Watch the video for a complete walk-through of how the new system works. Then, if you ever need to reference the more high-level information contained in the tutorial you will soon be able to find it all on LearnStuff. Or you can just check out our summary below this video.

Ladies and gentleman, Justin Schaffer on rADmin:

Video Highlights

Overall Advertising Interface

When you first click into the "Advertising" section of Radmin, you'll see a grid with a similar layout as the other sections of Radmin.

• For clarity, you'll see only your current active ads, sorted alphabetically by ad location.  
• Clicking into the filters section at the top of your ads will allow you to filter by Advertiser name and ad unit, or check "Include Inactive" to display ads not currently running. 
• The columns displayed on the Advertising homepage include:
• Advertiser: The advertiser attached to the respective ad. This controls how ads are grouped together when pulling ad reports. For best results, you should have one and only one advertiser in your system for each respective client/partner that advertises on your site.
• Campaign: The campaign attached to the respective ad. This field is purely for organizational purposes, and should be used to group together ads with a common theme/ad buy. 
• Ad Name: The unique name attached to the respective ad. This is most commonly used to combine the advertiser, campaign, and location to make the ad easily identifiable when scanning the list of ads. Review the below recommended hierarchy of the Advertiser/Campaign/Ad Name relationship-

• Start Date: The date the respective ad will go live.
• End Date: The last date the ad will run. For Featured Events, the ad will end at the start time of the event. For brand ads, the ad will run through the entirety of the end date, then automatically pause afterwards.  
• Location: The ad's respective ad unit (Featured Event, Top Right, Listings Middle, User/Venue Widget, Leaderboard)
• Weight: The percentage (out of 100 page loads) that a brand ad will be served. Adjusting a brand ad's weight will proportionately adjust the weights of all other brand ads concurrently running in the same ad unit. For example, adding a new Top Right ad with a weight of 50 will cut the weights of every other Top Right brand ad in half. Adding a new Top Right ad with a weight of 100 will set all other Top Right ads to a weight of 0.
• Impressions: The number of impressions that the respective ad has accumulated over its lifetime, compared to its Impression Goal (the target number of impressions set during ad creation). 
• ***Note: the daily update of how many impressions a given ad has received will not be immediately live when launching, but should be introduced in the week following when you first have Radmin ads access.

Ad Creation

Ad creation for all ads now takes place in the same area. No more navigating between different sections of admin for each ad unit. Simply click "New Ad" in the top right of your Advertising home page, and you'll have an option of creating an ad for any ad unit on your site. Much of the basic ad creation process is the same as admin, with a few differences highlighted below:

• Required Advertiser/Campaign Fields: It is now impossible to create an ad without associating it with an advertiser. This should prevent any problems with ads not showing up when ad reports are pulled. For brand ads, you must associate it with a campaign before creating the ad. 
• Duplicate Advertiser Prevention: It is also impossible to create two advertisers that have the same name. You'll get this error message instead:
  
  
  
  (Note: you could still create one advertiser called "Live Nation" and another called "LiveNation" so always try to add an existing advertiser before creating a new one)
• Venue/User Widget Mutually Exclusive: When creating a venue/user widget, once you associate it with a user OR venue, the other option will no longer be available. In other words, you can't associate a widget with both a venue and user. Once associated with a particular venue/user, that will automatically become the Advertiser for the widget. 
• Impression Goal: How many impressions a brand ad needs to deliver to the advertiser for the respective ad. Used for comparison against how many impressions the ad has actually received to date, which will display for each ad on the Advertising home page. 

You're a rADmin grAD

At the end of the day, we recognize that easy ad setup and management means happy advertisers, and happy advertisers means happy metros. That said, if there's something here that's making you less than giddy, we want to hear it. We're still in the early stages of this, so any feedback is welcome.

That's all for now; start making some rADs!