XF 1.1 Advertisements?

K Ozturk

Member
Hello,

How do we activate the Advertisement Management module, if there is any, and how do we place the banners? Is there an instruction for this that I am missing?

Thanks.
 
Hi Brogan,

I have over 60 different banners to show in rotation from 10 advertisers, and I need a bit more sophisticated tool than a simple template editing job to manage all this. I need to count displays and clicks and statistics etc and provide my advertisers with them.

I used to use Advertisement Management from http://www.lithiumstudios.org/ when I was on PhpBB3 to manage all that and it was very good.

Is there something similar for Xenforo at all? What's currently offered in above thread is very primitive and far from being a professional solution.

Thanks.
 
openx is an ad management software. You add advertisers, define campaigns, set ad zones. You can set campaigns by cpm, cpc, tennancy...pretty much any possible way you want.
I use it at www.arbtalk.co.uk

The banners down the right all display randomly, then I have targeted banner ads in the header of each different forum. These all display randomly also based on what i put in the openx software.

So basically if you find the appropriate template edits here at xenforo, you would put your invocation codes in from openx and serve the ads from there.

Hope that makes sense!(it doesnt to me, i pay someone else to do it for me)
 
Thanks a lot for the info mates, I think I better check them out.

By the way I couldn't help noticing your awesome avatar, Steve. I have a 5-month old baby boy and he loves to sleep on my chest like that as well. Dad Power, eh? ;)

Amazing.
 
I'm still using an ancient perl system called webadverts (free) to manage millions of banners per year. You can easily set this up with javascript calls from XF or other forum SW.
I have it serving numerous different advertisers and even putting in google ads for excess inventory.
You can use the openx or google stuff to do the same thing, but I found those systems confusing.

A similar simple system which is still supported is:
http://www.clippersoft.net/

In any of these cases, you would use XF conditionals (for instance, what forum node ID you were in) to build a URL query to pull in a certain ad account.
 
Right.

Firstly, I've checked out Google DFP. Yeah it's free and all, but it is a hosted solution, and requires me to enroll in their AdSense scheme. I do not want to let Google tap into my advertisement business even if it is only for collecting traffic data. I would rather pay for a simple utility on my own server than an agent in disguise under the coat of the most comprehensive 3rd party hosted ad management tool.

And, OpenX looks good too, but they won't tell me how much it will cost to have it until I tell them how much I will be making with it. Wow, am I buying a product, or getting a new shareholder on board? I don't like that opportunist behaviour.

MySimpleAds of Clippersoft also looks good AND reasonable to me. I'll investigate it further.

And I am also checking out the XF add-ons but I haven't been impressed by any so far. They all seem to be half-done in beta stage and stuff.

Not entirely pleased with the current situation. May be it's because I don't quite understand what is what at the moment, but Xenforo's current failure to offer a half-decent ads management tool as part of the core or an option to a "pro" paid forum solution is not so gratifying.
 
And, OpenX looks good too, but they won't tell me how much it will cost to have it until I tell them how much I will be making with it. Wow, am I buying a product, or getting a new shareholder on board? I don't like that opportunist behaviour.


hmmmm they must have changed something then. It doesnt cost me anything?
 
Not entirely pleased with the current situation. May be it's because I don't quite understand what is what at the moment, but Xenforo's current failure to offer a half-decent ads management tool as part of the core or an option to a "pro" paid forum solution is not so gratifying.
Perhaps a little more research would have been prudent?
The pre-sales forum is a good place to ask questions before purchasing.
 
With all due respect, Brogan, that attitude is not a way to go. You've got to remember that I am a PAYING customer, and I expect a little higher standard from what I've paid for compared to what I used to get for free before it.

The existing discussions in the pre -sales forum are as you have already included in your first reply in this thread, and if you go and look back into them, you'll see what kind of impression it gives to a potential buyer. "Wow, they have integrated ads module!". Very carefully worded responses indeed.

Only to find it is just a simple BB code inserter to the page layout after all. And this is found out after buying the stuff of course.

When I did that much editing in PhpBB, I'd got a pretty decent ads management tool.

There were no Ajax, no PSV Eindhoven and no flashy stuff and PhpBB logos didn't fly about upon login and all that, but it sure let me manage tons of adverts at one go, giving the advertisers their own logins to retrieve their statistics etc. And it was all free.

I am not implying that I should be getting the same for free here, but at least I am entitled to expect that standard from a paid solution like this. The current built-in ads solution is pants. You know that, and everyone knows that. I wonder who is using it here.

May be a "sorry about that shortcoming, we are currently working on a module that will be offered free/at an extra cost soon, but in the mean time you may try these solutions: ..." would be a better approach and win my heart over. Would you like to try that?

Thanks.
 
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