This module allows website owners using AWPCP to monetize their classifieds pages through banner advertisements. These banners can be sold and managed through the admin interface and rotated throughout the AWPCP classifieds section in various locations. It can be used with AdSense, but is intended for use with banner ad sales you do directly.
Sales Representatives (SR)
The Campaign Manager module adds a Sales Representative role that allows regular users to have access to the Campaign Management features of the module, without giving them access to other adminsitrative features.
A Sale Representative has the same capabilities as a Subscriber, except they also can create Campaigns.
Advertisement Positions
The Campaign Manager module enables several advertisement positions, described below:
- Top: Allows administrators and SR to show banners on top of the list of listings and main menu, right after the page title.
- Middle: Allows administrators and SR to show a variable number of banners in the middle of the list of listings. A banner spot will be available after every 5 listings.
- Bottom: Allows administrators and SR to show banners below the list of listings.
- Sidebar One & Two: Allows adminsitrators and SR to show banners in the sidebar adding a special wiget, the Advertisement Placeholder widget. When you add the widget to one of your sidebars, you can choose which advertisement position will be shown:
Then, in the frontend, banners for those positions will appear:
The widget can be added to the sidebar as many times as you want, so the same banner could be shown at the top of the sidebar and at the bottom, for example. You could also show a banner from Sidebar One at the top and different banner from Sidebar Two at the bottom.
- Footer: Similiar to the Sidebar One and Sidebar Two positions, the Footer position is available using the Advertisement Placeholder. This positions was created to be inserted in “sidebars” that appear in the footer of a webiste, but it can be used in any sidebar.
Advertisement Positions Dimensions
When the plugin is installed, the Top, Middle, Bottom and Footer positions are configured to accept banners of 650x150px, and the Sidebar One and Sidebar Two positions, to accept banners of 250x150px.
Those dimensiones can be adjusted from the module settings, going to Campaigns > Ad. Positions in the admin dashboard.
Campaigns
In order to decide which banners to show and when, administratros and SR need to create Campaigns. A Campaign is created from the Campaigns > Add New Campaign menu item. At first all the information you need to create a campaign is a start date, an end date and whether the campaign is going to be enabled or disabled. Don’t worry if you don’t have a value for properties yet; they can be changed later just as easy.
When a you create a Campaign, you are redirected to a special page where you can continue editing the campaign. Now there are more fields available. You can start creating Campaign Sections and defining the Campaign Content.
Campaign Sections
A campaign section defines the category of listings, the page of results and the positions where the campaign is going to be active. If you want a campaign to show the top banner in the first page of results for the listings in the California > Auto/Trucks category, then you will create a Campaign Section like the one below:
There is no limit in the number of campaign sections that you can create, so your campaign can be configured to show banners every where.
As soon as you create the first Campaign Section, the page updates itself showing a new kind of form. With Campaign Sections you define where and when to show banners. The new forms allow you to define the content of the banners for each advertisement position.
Campaign Content
In the example above we created a Campaign Section to show the top banner in the list of listings that belong to the California > Auto/Trucks category. Now, with the Campaign Content forms, you are going to control the actual content of the banner:
The content for a given position can be:
- An image.
- An image with a link that points to an URL of your choice.
- Plain text.
- HTML.
- PHP code (that will be executed everytime the banner is being rendered).
As you add more Campaign Sections targeting other advertisement positions, more Campaign Content forms will become available, allowing you to define the content for each position independently.
Placeholder Campaign
There is a special type of campaign that is used to show banners for positions where other Campaigns are not active. We call it the Placeholder Campaign. It work like this: if none of the defined campaigns have a Campaign Section for the bottom banner, in the first page of listings in the Furniture category, the banner defined for the bottom position in the Placeholder Campaign will be used.
The Placeholder Campaign has no Campaign Sections because, as explained above, it applies for all positions, in any page of results, for listings in all categories.
Additionally, there can only be one Campaign Placeholder per website. You can delete it, create a new one, and edit the content of the advertisement positions, but you cannot create more than Campaign Placeholder. It is also not necessary.
Before you create your Placeholder Campaign, is important that you consider how many results per page do you want to show. This number is important because it controls how many middle positions you will have available per page of results. Remember that a spot for a banner in the middle position will be available after every five listings, so if you are showing 25 listings per page, you will have up to 4 middle advertisement positions, and you will be able to show different content for each.
It is important to think about that number before creating the Placeholder Campaign, because when the campaign is created, it will be pre-loaded with a content form for every possible advertisement position, given the current configuration. If you change the number of listings to show per page, after the Placeholder Campaign has been created, you may end up with less content forms, restricting your ability to change what is being shown in the missing positions.
To change the number of listings to be shown per page, go to Classifieds > Settings > Ad/Listings and look for the Pagination Options setting:
Uncheck all of the pagination options and enter the number of results per page you want as the value for the Default number of Ads per page setting.
It is important to disable all pagination options to prevent users from changing the number of results per page. If they are allowed to change how many results are shown in each page, it would be really hard for you and the plugin to control haw many middle advertisemnt positions are available in the website, because it will all depend on the user preferences.
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The form to edit a campaign placeholder in a website where up to 3 middle positions are available, looks like the form in the image below:
