How to add country or city capping to publisher ad tag?

When downloading the ad tag from Brand Central’s ad tag site, publishers receive documentation on how to modify the ad tags by adding additional parameters. An example of an ad tag page can be found here:

https://mybrandcentral.com/tags/?id=MTIxNzl8NTg0fGNqa0VJVVk0NjcA

Based on the campaign target audience and its strategic direction, publishers may want to restrict the campaign (or individual flights) to certain countries or cities, or prevent certain countries or cities from being exposed to the ad of a flight. This can be achieved via two new parameters bcGeoCountry and bcGeoCity which can be appended to the launch code provided on the publishers ad tag page.

The syntax for the parameters is as follows:

&bcGeoCountry=ALLOW:DE,AE,QR
--> ad ONLY shown if user from Germany, U.A.E. or Qatar

&bcGeoCountry=ALLOW:DE
--> ad ONLY shown if user from Germany

&bcGeoCountry=DISALLOW:OM,RU
--> ad ALWAYS shown except if user from Oman or Russia    

&bcGeoCity=ALLOW:Dubai,Berlin
--> ad ONLY shown if user from Berlin or Dubai

&bcGeoCity=DISALLOW:Sharjah
--> ad ALWAYS shown except if user from Sharjah

The allow, disallow, country parameter and cities can be in UPPER or lower case or cOmBINation of both. No spaces between allow/disallow command and parameters, and the country and city list can have unlimited parameters.

If the flight parameter prevent the ad from being shown, either Brand Central internal ad inventory or an empty spacer.gif banner in the relevant size is being shown with descriptive <ALT> and <TITLE> text information showing the detected city/country and ALLOW/DISALLOW parameters.

What can geo-targeting be used for?

Geo-targeting by country or city can be particularly helpful for restricting certain internet users in the world from being exposed to an ad, for example: A bank is preparing for an IPO campaign that has legal restrictions to show the marketing efforts only in a certain country, or preventing from being seen in another country. The allow and disallow country command cater for that.

Another example could be to limit media wastage by restricting banners shown through Brand Central only to users to a certain city, where an event is being promoted.

The options are endless, and the combination of allowing or disallowing countries and/or cities to be included in the geo-targeting capping options of Brand Central provides flexibility to those publishers who do not have this functionality as part of their ad servers.

Other recommended articles

• How to generate publishers ad tags
• How to access campaign reports by country and city
• List of ISO Country codes

Requirements:

• Mathematical understanding of coordinate systems to calculate offsets
• Basic knowledge of Flash

User Experience:

First of all, the expandable banners on Brand Central work the following way from the user perspective:

• A default banner e.g. 728×90 pixel is shown on screen (which can be clickable using normal click tags)
• Upon user interaction of moving the mouse into the area of the default banner, a second banner is loaded (overlay or expandable banner). Typically, that second banner should be of larger size of the default banner and in most cases it will expand on either one of the sides (width or height) of the default banner, e.g. 728×400 pixel banner expanding towards the footer of the screen.
• The expandable overlay banner is clickable similar to any other flash banner within Brand Central.
• Upon user interaction of moving the mouse out of the area of the expanded banner, it will disappear and the default banner will appear again.
• Alternatively, a close (X) button within the expanded Flash banner caters for user-controlled action to make the expanded banner disappear.

Creative Requirements:

Every expandable banner requires at least two creative banner executions:

• The default banner can be in Flash or animated GIF/JPG or even a text based ad with or without a click tag. Please note that if you are using any streaming sound or video in the default banner, its should only be activated on user interaction and once the expandable banner is loaded, no conflicting sound elements played, e.g. sound on both banners.
• The expandable overlay banner can also be in Flash (with transparent background) or animated FIG/JPG or text based and should have a call to action with a click tag. In most of the cases the banner size of the expandable banner will be just an extension of one of the edges of the default banner, e.g. either width or height. However, there is a certain flexibility on how the expanded banner can appear upon user interaction which is outlined in the graph below:

The offset x represents the relative position of the expandable overlay banner on the x-axis (horizontal axis) whereas offset y represents the relative position of the expandable overlay banner on the y-axis (vertical axis) on a browser window. Please note that the (top, left) position of a screen is refered to as (0,0).

In the above example, the skyscraper is positioned on the right hand side of the publisher’s page and the expandable overlay banner would expand to the left, hence the offset x would be negative and the offset y=0 since there should be no vertical movement of the banner.

As a rule of thumb, for an expandable skyscraper right-to-left the offset x can be calculated as follows:

offset x = width sky - width expandable sky
e.g.
offset x = 120px - 400px
         = -280px

In the example of a top positioned leaderboard banner (728×90) which can expand vertically towards the footer of the screen into an expandable banner (728×400), the calculation would be as follows:

offset x = 0 (no movement horizontally)
offset y = 0 (as expandable fully overlays)

Click and Close Tags

Click and close tags need to be inserted within the Flash file(s) depending on the creative objective:

• The default banner - which is primarily being used to mouse over and to trigger the user-interaction for the expanded banner to be shown - can have a Click Tag implemented as well. In case a user clicks that banner, the target URL of the default flight will be opened. If no Click Tag is implemented, no clicks will be recorded and the default banner will not be clickable.
• The expanded banner - which expands upon user mouse over the default banner - can also have a Click Tag implemented which will link through to the target URL of the related expanded banner.
• At least either one of the two banners - default or related - should have a Click Tag implemented, and there is no problem of having the Click Tag in both banners.
• The expanded banner can have an additional close (X) button in order to manually trigger user-interaction to close the related expanded bannner without a mouse interaction. Please note that in case both Click Tag and Close (X) button being used in the related expanded banner, the hit area of the clickable banner should not overlap the hit area of the Close (X) button. Macromedia provides a Flash Designer Guide which might be useful to read. The syntax for the Close (X) button can be found below.
• In addition to the user-interaction of the Close (X) button, the same tag can be used to auto-close the related expanded area. Instead of triggering the close tag as a user-controlled button, it can be also called as Actionscript code at the end of a movie clip animation or after a certain number of seconds in a timer control in order to auto-close the expanded banner. Please follow the syntax below.

Close Tag for button triggered by user-interaction through Flash button:

on(release) {
    getURL("javascript:bcExpHide();void(0);");
}

Close Tag for button triggered without user-interaction e.g. at the end of a movie clip timeline:

getURL("javascript:bcExpHide();void(0);");

Flight setup

The media trafficker needs to setup the flights in Brand Central and upload respective creative for the system to work on a publisher site. The following steps are required:

• Create campaign and flight via media planner and quick flighting module for both default and overlay banner as if they were individual flights. Upload creative and set click tags and any other parameter.
• Go to Media Planner | Select Flight | List Flights | Select flight with default banner | Click ‘Edit Flights’
• In the ‘Edit Flight’ screen select the flight with the expandable banner from the drop down and modify the offset x/y coordinate accordingly

Publisher codes and tracking

Publishers should insert the tracking tag of the default banner only within their ad server or website without any additional parameters. The expandable banner will be called from Brand Central automatically upon user interaction.

Please also note that Mozilla requires transparency which can be set through the wmode=transparent parameter that is explained in the ad tag page for publishers. Any other parameters such as frequency capping and anti-cache bursting technology still applies.

Please note that within the tracking module of Brand Central, both banners are tracked as individual flights. The default banner will in most cases have only impressions tracked wherease the expandable banner shows the number of expansions due to user interaction on the default banner as impression and both banners show clicks based on user interaction via the click tag.

On the expandable banner, only one impression is being logged even if the user interacts multiple time e.g. the banner is being called multiple times.

A sample banner can be found here and a FLA demo file can be downloaded here.

Brand Central provides tracking codes that will display the digital ad creative on a publisher’s website without having to send any creative files to the publishers. These invocation codes are typically inserted into the publisher’s ad server or web page in order to display the creative.

Every time a user requests the publisher’s website, the Brand Central tracking code should be requested from the Brand Central server in order to monitor and track impressions and other user interactivity.

However, due to the fact that Brand Central’s tracking script is very likely to get cached in order to minimize bandwidth on ad creative, there might be a (sometimes substancial) discrepancy in the impressions recorded on publisher’s ad server when compared to Brand Central. Please note that the discrepancy will always be in the favour of the client e.g. less impressions on Brand Central versus more on the publisher who should deliver as per Brand Central tracking results.

Requirements:

• Administrator or web master of ad server
• Basic knowledge of HTML and Javascript

Solution:

Enable anti-caching technique by adding a random parameter with time stamp and random number dynamically to Brand Central tracking code before inserting it to the publisher adserver:

<script src="http://mybrandcentral.com/ads/?id=1
&cacheBurst={timestamp}{random}” …>

Please note that publishers need to define a dynamic variable or place holder for {timestamp} and {random} which is typically availabel within all common ad servers.

A detailed description is included in the trafficking codes when downloaded from Brand Central into Excel.

Google Adwords are a Pay Per Click (PPC) program of advertising on Google. The ads appear on the right hand side of the Google Search page on keywords / key phrases that you choose.

Brand Central provides the possibility to track the clicks on every adword through Brand Central. Any further conversion should be tracked through post-click activities.

Requirements:

• Google Adword account
• Basic knowledge of HTML

Solution:

Create a text file with any text editor such as Windows notepad and enter the following text:

<B><A href=ClickTAG>Our new offer comes here</A></B>
<BR>This is the first line with 30 characters
<BR>This is the second line with 30 characters
<BR><A href=ClickTAG>www.client-website.com</A>

Please note that the first and last line are clickable whereas the second and third are simply discriptive information.

Out of browser creative runs, as the name says, out of the browser. Typical out of browser publishers are MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and other non-browser related digital creative platforms.

Requirements:

• Advanced knowledge of Macromedia Flash and Actionscript

Solution:

MSN Messenger does not allow tracking of impressions and clicks, since it is an out of Browser activity. However, there is a way around by inserting a code within Flash that loads a tracking script via an external Flash (SWF) file on a Brand Central tracking server that records relevant activites.

Please use the following instructions

• Provide Flash files and fonts to MSN
• Make sure Brand Central has the correct creative selected, e.g. MSN Half Banner or MSN Today
• Within the Flash create a blank layer in level zero and put a key frame in frame #1, press F9 in order to insert the following code after manually modifying the flightID from Brand Central:

flightID = 1020;

cacheburst = Math.round(Math.random() * (9999999999 - 1000000000)) + 1000000000;
createEmptyMovieClip(”bcOutOfBrowser”, 9098);
bcOutOfBrowser._x = -100;
url = “http://ads.flipcorp.com/bcOutOfBrowser.swf?cacheburst=”+cacheburst+”&flightID=”+flightID;
bcOutOfBrowser.loadMovie(url);

Please note that you modify the flightID to the respective parameter from Brand Central.

Typically, an HTML email has one or more click tags that provide the reader with an option to click and navigate to a target URL of a specific campaign. Brand Central by default tracks the opening rate (impression) and number of clicks within the email and certain code is required.

Requirements:

• Basic knowledge of Photoshop and HTML

Solution:

Design an email template in Photoshop or any other graphics application and create XHTML valid code with all related images and external files to be hosted on your web server that will be connected to the internet so that readers of your mailshot can download related images and assets. Please note that images URL need to be hard coded with the full URL to image path.

The HTML file should have no start <HTML> and end </HTML> tags as email providers will have to strip out that content anyways. Also any browser specific tags have to be stripped out, HTML emails should ideally start and end with a <TABLE> tag. Also, try to avoid external CSS and use inline style sheets and instead, and no javascript should be allowed whatsoever.

Instead of using a <A href=”www.yourdomain.com” target=”_blank”>Click Here!</A> command, the following code should be applied for all URLs that you want to track:

<A href=”ClickTAG”>Click Here!</A>

When uploading the HTML file to Brand Central’s creative module, the system will replace the ClickTAG with a proper domain that tracks your clicks.

If you would like to use multiple click tags to different target URLs, you can add the &url parameter and then apply post-click activity tracking codes which are explained in a different knowledge base article.

Close tags can be used in E-Blaster or Eyeblaster banner to make the overlay banner disappear upon a click or user interaction event or on auto close after a certain time. Most publishers require an auto-close after maximum of 15 seconds that an overlay banner is displayed.

Requirements:

• Macromedia Flash authoring environment
• Basic knowledge of HTML and Actionscript

Solution:

Create a close button in Flash, define the hitarea and apply the following code (F9) in the action scrip window:

on(release) {
	getURL("javascript:bcDivHide();void(0);");
}

A similiar code could/should be used for auto closing the overlay banner, e.g. after 15 seconds. If publishers require for this particular event or the creative is required to auto close, then the same code should be applied in any frame on the main timeline, just without the functioned being fired by an event :

getURL("javascript:bcDivHide();void(0);");

A sample file can be downloaded here.

Note

Please note that for expandable banners, a different function needs to be called to close the overlay aread of an expanded banner. A more detailed explanation of the Brand Central close function for expanded banners can be found here.

Click tags are simple action scrip code snippets that can be programmed in Macromedia Flash on a button or the main timeline. Brand Central works with standard code tags in order to pass customized click URLs from Flash to Brand Central in order to provide tracking.

Requirements:

• Macromedia Flash authoring environment installed
• Basic knowledge of HTML and Actionscript

Solution:

Create a button in Flash, define the hitarea and apply the following code (F9) in the action scrip window:

on(release) {
	getURL(ClickTAG);
}

Please note that “ClickTAG” is case sensitive and should not be spelled differently.

A sample file can be downloaded here.