Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes (geocodes) developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this. The most famous of these is ISO 3166-1.

Brand Central Codes

AF - Afghanistan
AL - Albania
DZ - Algeria
AS - American Samoa
AD - Andorra
AO - Angola
AI - Anguilla
AQ - Antarctica
AG - Antigua and Barbuda
AR - Argentina
AM - Armenia
AW - Aruba
AU - Australia
AT - Austria
AZ - Azerbaijan
BS - Bahamas
BH - Bahrain
BD - Bangladesh
BB - Barbados
BY - Belarus
BE - Belgium
BZ - Belize
BJ - Benin
BM - Bermuda
BT - Bhutan
BO - Bolivia
BA - Bosnia - Herzegovina
BW - Botswana
BV - Bouvet Island
BR - Brazil
IO - British Virgin Island
BN - Brunei
BG - Bulgaria
BF - Burkina Faso
BI - Burundi
KH - Cambodia
CM - Cameroon United Republic
CA - Canada
CV - Cape Verde
KY - Cayman Islands
CF - Central African Republic
TD - Chad
CL - Chile
CN - China
CX - Christmas Island
CC - Cocos (Keeling) Islands
CO - Colombia
KM - Comoros
CG - Congo
CD - Congo
CK - Cook Islands
CR - Costa Rica
CI - Ivory Coast
HR - Croatia
CU - Cuba
CY - Cyprus
CZ - Czech Republic
DK - Denmark
DJ - Djibouti
DM - Dominica
DO - Dominican Republic
TP - East Timor
EC - Ecuador
EG - Egypt
SV - El Salvador
GQ - Equatorial Guinea
ER - Eritrea
EE - Estonia
ET - Ethiopia
FK - Falkland Islands
FO - Faroe Islands
FJ - Fiji
FI - Finland
FR - France
GF - French Guiana
PF - French Polynesia
TF - French Southern and Antarctic Lands
GA - Gabon
GM - Gambia
GE - Georgia
DE - Germany
GH - Ghana
GI - Gibraltar
GR - Greece
GL - Greenland
GD - Grenada
GP - Guadeloupe
GU - Guam
GT - Guatemala
GN - Guinea
GW - Guinea-bissau
GY - Guyana
HT - Haiti
HM - Heard and McDonald Islands
VA - Holy See (Vatican City State)
HN - Honduras
HK - Hong Kong
HU - Hungary
IS - Iceland
IN - India
ID - Indonesia
IR - Iran
IQ - Iraq
IE - Ireland
IL - Israel
IT - Italy
JM - Jamaica
JP - Japan
JO - Jordan
KZ - Kazakhstan
KE - Kenya
KI - Kiribati
KP - Korea, South
KR - Korea, Republic
KW - Kuwait
KG - Kyrgyzstan
LA - Laos
LV - Latvia
LB - Lebanon
LS - Lesotho
LR - Liberia
LY - Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
LI - Liechtenstein
LT - Lithuania
LU - Luxembourg
MO - Macau
MK - Macedonia, The former Yugoslav Republic of
MG - Madagascar
MW - Malawi
MY - Malaysia
MV - Maldives
ML - Mali
MT - Malta
MH - Marshall Islands
MQ - Martinique
MR - Mauritania
MU - Mauritius
YT - Mayotte
MX - Mexico
FM - Micronesia, Federated States Of
MD - Moldova, Republic of
MC - Monaco
MN - Mongolia
MS - Montserrat
MA - Morocco
MZ - Mozambique
MM - Myanmar
NA - Namibia
NR - Nauru
NP - Nepal
NL - Netherlands
AN - Netherlands Antilles
NC - New Caledonia
NZ - New Zealand
NI - Nicaragua
NE - Niger
NG - Nigeria
NU - Niue
NF - Norfolk Island
MP - Northern Mariana Islands
NO - Norway
OM - Oman
PK - Pakistan
PW - Palau
PS - Palestinian Territory, Occupied
PA - Panama
PG - Papua New Guinea
PY - Paraguay
PE - Peru
PH - Philippines
PN - Pitcairn
PL - Poland
PT - Portugal
PR - Puerto Rico
QA - Qatar
RE - Reunion
RO - Romania
RU - Russian Federation
RW - Rwanda
KN - Saint Kitts and Nevis
LC - Saint Lucia
VC - Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
WS - Samoa
SM - San Marino
ST - Sao Tome and Principe
SA - Saudi Arabia
SN - Senegal
SC - Seychelles
SL - Sierra Leone
SG - Singapore
SK - Slovakia (Slovak Republic)
SI - Slovenia
SB - Solomon Islands
SO - Somalia
ZA - South Africa
GS - South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
ES - Spain
LK - Sri Lanka
SH - St. Helena
PM - St. Pierre and Miquelon
SD - Sudan
SR - Suriname
SJ - Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands
SZ - Swaziland
SE - Sweden
CH - Switzerland
SY - Syrian Arab Republic
TW - Taiwan
TJ - Tajikistan
TZ - Tanzania, United Republic of
TH - Thailand
TG - Togo
TK - Tokelau
TO - Tonga
TT - Trinidad and Tobago
TN - Tunisia
TR - Turkey
TM - Turkmenistan
TC - Turks and Caicos Islands
TV - Tuvalu
UG - Uganda
UA - Ukraine
AE - United Arab Emirates
UK - United Kingdom
US - United States
UM - United States Minor Outlying Islands
UY - Uruguay
UZ - Uzbekistan
VU - Vanuatu
VE - Venezuela
VN - Vietnam
VG - Virgin Islands (British)
VI - Virgin Islands (USA)
WF - Wallis and Futuna Islands
EH - Western Sahara
YE - Yemen
YU - Yugoslavia
ZM - Zambia
ZW - Zimbabwe

Campaign and flight data can be viewed on screen or conviently exported into Microsoft Excel reports (with charts) showing the data grouped and totalled by the city of origin, e.g. where the impression, click or post-click activity was originated from. Total and unique data per campaign and per flight is available.

The geotargeting database with country and city information is updated on a monthly base and as accurate as paid supplier databases provide the data.

Assuming that the media plan created under the media planning module has gotten signed off, the first step would be to change the campaign status to ‘approved’ in order to start work on the media plan in the creative module.

How to change status of the media plan?

Agency media planners and traffickers should follow this process:

• Login to Brand Central
• Select agency module “Media Planner”
  • Highlight campaign and click on edit campaign button in order to modify campaign settings
  • Scroll down and change campaign status to ‘Approved’
  • After Saving status, press PTF button in order to push campaign status to all flights

The next step would be to extract the specification sheet and the Brand Central ‘ClickTAG’ encoding documentation to send to your creative agency.

How to extract spec sheet and ‘ClickTAG’ documentation?

Agency media planners and traffickers should follow this process to extract the required documents of the approved campaign:

• Login to Brand Central
• Select agency module “Creative”
• Highlight campaign and click on XLS button to extract the specsheet and the ClickTAG documentation.

Once the creative agency has provided the necessary files in the required formats with the correct flash clickTAG encoding, the next logical step would be to upload the creatives onto the system and to link them to the respective flights

How to upload creatives onto Brand Central?

Agency media planners and traffickers should follow this process to upload creatives onto the system:

• Login to Brand Central
• Select agency module “Creative”
• Highlight campaign and switch to ‘view creative’ module by clicking on and then start to upload the creative which allows user to see all past and present creatives on a single screen which is updated in real time.  Once you enter the viewing mode you can use the buttons to add, edit/link or delete creatives respectively.

Once you upload the creative and press save you would be able to see a screen as below:

Once you are able to see the screen shown above, it implies that your creative has successfully been uploaded. Now the creative has to be linked to the correct flights. This can be done by clicking on the link creative Tab and linking as shown below. Please do remember to link the correct flights to the uploaded creative.

How to upload screenshots?

Agency media planners and traffickers should follow this process:

• Login to Brand Central
• Select agency module “Reporting”
• Highlight campaign and click on button to open Screenshot module
  • Use buttons to Add New, Edit and delete screenshots respectively.
  • Please do note to use proper naming conventions so as to enhance usability.

How to view screenshots?

Agency media planners, traffickers and Clients should follow this process to view the screenshots already uploaded:

• Login to Brand Central
• Select agency/client module “Reporting”
• Highlight campaign and click on button to open Screenshot module

From here you can either

• Use the button to view each uploaded screenshot in pop up window with the comments and all details visible or
• Use the direct links under “click to view “to view each uploaded screenshot in a light box plugin which can be closed by pressing the “Esc” key or by clicking “Close” button.

You can find a screenshot below on how both options can be done from the same screen.

Also please find a screenshot on how the uploaded screenshot is viewed with the lightbox plugin.

Brand Central has a module called ‘Flight Bundling’ which caters for combining multiple creative flights to one or more bundles and it is this module which we will be using to achieve our goal.

The basic idea here is to split flights within the media plan according to the necessary weightage of the creative executions and then to bundle these flights up so that eventually only a single launch code is provided to the publisher with complete control over creative rotation lying within Brand Central

How to setup the flight bundles?

Agency media planners and traffickers should follow this process:

• Login to Brand Central
• Select agency module “Media Planning”
• Highlight campaign and click on button to open Quick Flighting module where all media planning is being done
  • Create the required number of flights corresponding to the number of creative executions within the same publisher and assure that the creative size and language e.g. English 468×60 is the same. Make sure that the flight status is set to ‘online’
  • Mark the flights that you would like to combine to a new bundle by clicking the checkboxes at the beginning of the flight row
  • Use the ‘Add to flight bundle button’ . Please note that you need to have at least one flight selected, and you cannot add flights from multiple publishers or different creative to a new bundle.
  • Once all the required flights have been bundled, select the ones which are scheduled to go live at a later date and set their flight status as paused
  • If you would like to add more flights to the same bundle at a later stage, mark at least one flight from the existing bundle and others and then follow the same procedure. New flights in the bundle are marked with a color automatically.
  • At some point during the media planning stage, use the creative module and upload and link multiple (different) creative to each flights in the bundle

The following screenshot taken at the start of the campaign shows the Quick Flighting module with the ad bundle option for a sample campaign with different creatives for each month.

Once the campaign is live and running, change the status of flights at the appropriate timelines to pause a certain creative and to put the next one live through the Media Planning module. This way we can make any number of creative changes without having to send a separate launch code to the publisher every time this is done.

The following screenshot taken at the beginning of the next month shows the reporting module with the flight statistics for the campaign so far.

The net total budget column is calculated as the sum of all flight net cost (or budget) from the client to the publisher, which is the line item unit price * number of impressions, clicks etc. booked minus any media discounts provided.

The total net budget amount typically matches the booking order value on the purchase order to the publisher. When drilling down into e.g. flight reporting, the break down by flight is also shown as ‘Cost per Click’, ‘Total Cost’ and ‘Cost to Date’.

Clients or Agencies do not have that net budget column as it refers to potential confidential data kept in the seperate media planning module.

The sort order (ascending or descending) of a particular column is indicated by a small up or downward arrow, and the priority of the order by a small number. In the below screen shot we are sorting in alphabetical order by media planner first, and then in descending numerical order by planned impressions.

The actual sort classification (alphabetic, numerical, by date) is automatically determined by the data format in the column.

Switching between ascending and descending sort order is achieved by clicking the column header of the table again, and by default ascending turns into descending and after another click the column is taken out of the sort order automatically. Another click adds it back into the sort order ascending, and another one then descending and so on.

If the user’s settings (in the main user default settings) are set to ‘toggle between ascending and descending’, then the column always remains in the sort algorithm and only gets taken out if the particular table is being called from the main menu again, the sort order of that particular column basically ‘toggles’ between ascending and descending, then ascending and descending again.

Best advice: Just try it out!

Click-throughs are measured as straight clicks based on user-interaction by clicking on an advertising banner. View-throughs are slightliy different and basically measure how many users have seen an ad and without immedately clicking have then or later visited the campaign target website medium and possibly interacted witht the same.

Within Brand Central, post-click activites can be setup through the media planning module:

• Login to Brand Central
• Navigate to Media Planning Module
• Select an existing campaign that you would like to setup post-click activity tracking for
• Press “List post-click activities” button

The post-click activity listing appears on the screen and caters for four options:

1. Create new post-click activity
2. Edit an existing post-click activity
3. Delete an existing post-click activity
4. Download post-click activity tags as Excel document

Every post-click activity (new or edit button) has a description which is being used as reference for all post-click activity reports. The URL refers to the target website URL which should be different for every post-click activity as they can only be tracked based on unique website URLs. The parameters can be used for additional tracking such as e-Commerce shopping value or other parameters that are not the focus of this article.

The Download button provides an Excel sheet with all post-click activity tags listed. The tags need to be inserted into the Content Management System or code of the client website. Please cater for time to allow that customization through the IT department of the client.

Post-click activity tags

The syntax of post-click activity tags for the website is as follows:

<script src="http://mybrandcentral.com/activities/?id=123456" language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"></script>

The above Javascript code has the post-click activity ID coded as parameter and should not be modified. Anti-caching can be applied like used in publisher ad tags.

The ad tag should be added at the end of the website in order to avoid any discrepancy in case the page is not fully loaded.

For Flash micro sites or other Flash based websites, the post-click activity tracking code can be called form within Flash Actionscript and needs to be slightly modified:

activityID = 1020;

cacheburst = Math.round(Math.random() * (9999999999 - 1000000000)) + 1000000000;
createEmptyMovieClip("bcPostClickActivity", 9098);
bcPostClickActivity._x = -100;
url = "http://mybrandcentral.com/activities/?id="+activityID"&cacheburst="+cacheburst;
bcOutOfBrowser.loadMovie(url);

Please note that advanced knowledge of Flash Actionscript is required.

Exceptions

Post-click activity tracking and reporting is achieved by using cookies on user’s machines that require user permission in order to record this user interaction based data. Cookies can be disabled or frequently deleted which may create certain discrepancy - as it is out of control of Brand Central system and the advertiser.

Please note that the domain for ad-serving, click-throughs and post-click activities needs to be from the same domain, e.g. “https://mybrandcentral.com” or “http://mybrandcentral.com” as cookies cannot be read accross multiple domains (in most cases). Some browsers do allow for 3rd- party cookies accross multiple domains, but that is never a 100% secure method.

In addition, if the target site is hosted on a secure server, e.g. https or even http password protected such as an intranet or extranet, cookies may not be allowed either from 3rd parties such as Brand Central. It is always advisible to properly test the campaign and post-click activites and if necessary, to consult the Brand Central support team. As a rule of thumb, https sites can be tracked by changing the domain name to “mybrandcentral.com” within the ad-serving, click-through and post-click activity tag.

Reporting

Post-click activities can be tracked via Brand Central’s reporting module which is available from the main navigation. Reports are available on campaign level (total number ofpost-click activity conversion calls, or via drill down through campaign, flight and post-click activitiy reports.

Graphs and Excel downloads are available as well for unlimited number of post-click activities.

CPA is considered the optimal form of buying online advertising from a direct response advertiser’s point of view. An advertiser only pays for the ad when an action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. (The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.) Google has incorporated this model into their Google AdSense offering while eBay has recently announced a similar pricing called AdContext.

A related term, eCPA or effective Cost Per Action, is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory purchased (by the advertiser) via a CPC, CPM, or CPT basis.

The CPA can be determined by different factors, depending where the online advertising inventory is being purchased.

CPA as “Cost Per Acquisition”

CPA is sometimes referred to as “Cost Per Acquisition”, which has to do with the fact that most CPA offers by advertisers are about acquiring something (mostly new customers, prospects or leads). Using the term “Cost Per Acquisition” instead of “Cost Per Action” is not incorrect. It is actually more specific. “Cost Per Acquisition” is included in “Cost Per Action”, but not all “Cost Per Action” offers can be referred to as “Cost Per Acquisition”.

Examples

• In online advertising, if a website sells banner ads for a $50 CPA, that means it costs $50 to generate a post-click action after a banner has been shown, possibly clicked and then a certain action happened.

See also

• CTR - Click-through rate
• CPC - Cost per Click
• CPD - Cost per day (time)
• CPM- Cost per mille

CPC is considered a direct response method that involves user interaction to click on a banner, email or text link. An advertiser only pays for the ad when a click action has occurred. Google has incorporated this model into their Google AdSense .

Click-through rate

Related to that, Click-through rate or CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and 1 person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1%.

CTR is most commonly defined as number of clicks divided by number of impressions and generally not in terms of number of persons who clicked. This is an important difference because if one person clicks 10 times on the same advertisement instead of once then the CTR would increase in the earlier definition but would stay the same in term of later definition.

See also

• CPA - Cost per Action
• CPD - Cost per day (time)
• CPM- Cost per mille