XenCentral Ad Server

XenCentral Ad Server [Paid] 2.0.0 beta 3 rev. 2

No permission to buy (€59.99)

XCentral

Well-known member
XCentral submitted a new resource:

XenCentral Ad Server - XC Ad Server is a fully featured and powerful advertisement system for XenForo

XenCentral Ad Server is a feature-rich and powerful system to run and manage advertisements on your XenForo community. The add-on is designed to work as enterprise level ad server and complete solution for advertisement management and community monetization. The system is fully integrated with XenForo administration and fully manageable from easy-to-use and friendly interface. The product comes with full PayPal and CDN integration, purchasing and embedding tools, enhanced statistics and much...

Read more about this resource...
 
Hello, @bladinium

Yes, the system is built using OOP approach and creating the system we kept in mind adding support for any third-party products with upcoming releases. The same time custom hook locations are so powerful that they can handle almost everything, and you can easily find-out what hook you need looking at the template, or just asking community. As for particular locations in XenPorta, just let us know what locations you would like to see, and we will add them to our todo list.

Thank you!
 
Very nice! Some questions:

  • Is this system only time based or is it also possible to let the customer buy a certain number of Adviews over a certain amount of time? Including equal distribution of the views during the time frame?
  • Is it possible to have fill ads, e.g. use Google Adsense for backfilling all remaining views?
  • Can I as an admin define banners that dont belong to any forum user? We have advertisers not interested in registering at a forum
  • Is it possible not to show the banner locations to normal users?
  • Does your addon make it possible to show the banner locations to someone not logged in? Maybe in a special mode?
  • As you are from Portugal I assume I can use "local payment" for bank transfers (very common in Europe)
  • Are your prices including VAT? I assume yes because you have a VAT number (uid)
And another one: you write
The product is not meant only for managing your ads on your site, but also to turn your site into a fully featured ad server for your users, even allowing them to run ads on other sites they own and come back to your site to see statistics, activate new banners etc
- how does this work?
 
Hello, @Walter

Please see the answers to your questions below:

Is this system only time based or is it also possible to let the customer buy a certain number of Adviews over a certain amount of time? Including equal distribution of the views during the time frame?

Now it is time-based only and implementing impression-based purchase/limiting is the next in our todo list.
Is it possible to have fill ads, e.g. use Google Adsense for backfilling all remaining views?

Yes, the first location you see in the list of locations is to include any new JS code to the head of all pages, so it can be used for any tracking codes etc.

Can I as an admin define banners that dont belong to any forum user? We have advertisers not interested in registering at a forum

Yes you can, it is the primary functionality the product is created for. That banners will not be shown in statistics to users, not be manageable by anyone from front-end.

Is it possible not to show the banner locations to normal users?

Just do not mark any zone as user zone and no one will be able to add banners there. Also do not give users permission to view front-end pages and they will not see any mention about ad system on the site, just the ads.

Does your addon make it possible to show the banner locations to someone not logged in? Maybe in a special mode?

If you mean Zone Information page at http://demo.xencentral.com/ads/zone it is available for users only for now. We will make it and statistics pages available for guests as well.

As you are from Portugal I assume I can use "local payment" for bank transfers (very common in Europe)

The local payment method is just technical name we gave to admin-only "method" which skips any remote servers and comes back to callback. Usually payment methods redirect users to payment processor site, where the payment is being processed and a callback URL is being called with validation information. This method just posts form data back to itself like callback is called, and this way we and admins can test the system itself (e.g. that user banner expiration date changes successfully) without having to do real or sandbox transactions. So, this is not connected with bank transfers in any way. We may consider to implement online banking and other payment methods in future based on customers' requirements.

Are your prices including VAT? I assume yes because you have a VAT number (uid)

No, the prices are excluding VAT. VAT is applied to EU customers orders who do not have valid EU VAT number.

And another one: you write
The product is not meant only for managing your ads on your site, but also to turn your site into a fully featured ad server for your users, even allowing them to run ads on other sites they own and come back to your site to see statistics, activate new banners etc
- how does this work?

Please check product's article at http://xencentral.com/products/ad-server.html for detailed information. Let us know if you have any other questions.

Thank you!
 
1. Will the banners turn automatically to responsive when viewing in mobile browsers?
2. I have many advertisers that pay just a flat monthly fee for certain banner locations - so lets say I have 5 advertisers and they all want to be shown equally amount of impressions - is this possible or do they have to pay for impressions or stop at a certain amount of impressions etc?
3. Does this slow down your server much?
4. Right now all our banner ads our hosted on a 3rd party site for tracking impressions/clicks and they can track it daily/weekly/monthly/geographically/etc. . Does this do the same or should I still use the 3rd party site?
 
Hello, @surfsup

Will the banners turn automatically to responsive when viewing in mobile browsers?
It depends entirely on banner content. You are free to have any HTML/JavaScript/CSS in your banner, and responsiveness depends on it entirely. If you have any types of banner you think some special responsiveness can be implemented by us, please let us know.

I have many advertisers that pay just a flat monthly fee for certain banner locations - so lets say I have 5 advertisers and they all want to be shown equally amount of impressions - is this possible or do they have to pay for impressions or stop at a certain amount of impressions etc?
Currently the product supports time-based campaigns, and impression-based campaign will be implemented in the next release. In the case described you should just create a zone, add all banners from that advertisers to that zone, and enable banner rotation. Banners will be shown in random order and therefor will be shown equal times.

Does this slow down your server much?
It does not slow-down page loading speeds at all, as it does not execute any queries and runs minimal possible code to inject banners into hooks. However, it runs queries when ad is being loaded using separate request, the queries are simple and optimized, however of course it increases the load of server appropriately to handle that additional requests. Any server that runs a campaign using any other ad server, like OpenX, and performs well, should handle load with our product as well.

Right now all our banner ads our hosted on a 3rd party site for tracking impressions/clicks and they can track it daily/weekly/monthly/geographically/etc. . Does this do the same or should I still use the 3rd party site?

We don't know what exactly you have in third-party site, and how much our addon covers that features. You can see the list of features in the article at http://xencentral.com/products/ad-server.html As we understand you are using some embed code to add ads from that third-party site to your site - you can keep using the sam embed codes with our product, just to easier embed them (instead of doing template edits). If you have full statistics for clicks, you have to use built-in banners (upload image/set text+set URL), not third-party code (third-parties generate many different types of ads and it impossible to track clicks for them).

Thank you!
 
Some feature requests that might make this worth leaving [bd]rotating ads (its free) for this:
  • The ability to turn adsense ads (or any other ads) responsive for mobile views.
  • The ability for users to buy add free subscriptions
 
Well, this is certainly a surprise...

I had been speaking to @Slavik awhile back about such a system that is shown here.

I'm going to at least purchase this and see if it will fit our needs to keep all of our advertising within XenForo. It certainly sounds and looks like what we've been trying to build.

At the very least, thanks for publishing this tool. ROI on setup time & 60 euros will be easy..... :)
 
Hi
@XCentral few questions:

- do you provide hooks to have adds within posts, ie second post of a thread (@digitalpoints addon has this support)?
- does this automatically support mobile responsive ads? for example if i have a 800 x 130 banner across the page, and someone on a mobile visits the site, do they get a responsive view automatically or does the same banner get displayed?
- does this support google adsense?
- can i get login credentials for the demo pmed to me so i can have a play?
 
Hello, @tajhay

- do you provide hooks to have adds within posts, ie second post of a thread (@digitalpoints addon has this support)?

Not yet, we are open to suggestions for any type of such special hooks, and will implement them within short timeframes, about 1 week period.

- does this automatically support mobile responsive ads? for example if i have a 800 x 130 banner across the page, and someone on a mobile visits the site, do they get a responsive view automatically or does the same banner get displayed?

This feature is not implemented yet, but we see it is requested a lot from our users so we will add it asap.

- does this support google adsense?

Yes, it supports any HTML/JS based code to added to the site. No specific support for Google Ads is needed as far as we are aware. If you need anything for that please let us know.

- can i get login credentials for the demo pmed to me so i can have a play?

Sent.

Thank you!
 
Some feature requests that might make this worth leaving [bd]rotating ads (its free) for this:
  • The ability to turn adsense ads (or any other ads) responsive for mobile views.
  • The ability for users to buy add free subscriptions

Hello, @Rho Delta

The responsiveness is already added to our task list and will be implemented soon.

As for purchasing ad-free subscription, we do not find it to be quite relevant for the product. We will implemented option to define usergroups who do not see ads at all, and administrator can setup user upgrade to sell the access to that usergroup, which will be exactly what you mentioned without new payment methods implementations etc. Please let us know your thoughts.

Thank you!
 
Found a conflict:

When using the 'Zone Statistics' option from the user control panel, we get these errors in each of the reporting blocks:

Code:
ErrorException: Object of class WidgetFramework_XenForo_View1 could not be converted to string - library\XenCentral\AdServer\ViewPublic\Stats.php:32
Generated By: Manager, 2 minutes ago
Stack Trace
#0 D:\WWW-PROD\lx\production\library\XenCentral\AdServer\ViewPublic\Stats.php(32): XenForo_Application::handlePhpError(4096, 'Object of class...', 'D:\WWW-PROD\lx...', 32, Array)
#1 D:\WWW-PROD\lx\production\library\XenCentral\AdServer\ViewPublic\Stats.php(30): XenCentral_AdServer_ViewPublic_Stats->_renderObjects(Array)
#2 D:\WWW-PROD\lx\production\library\XenCentral\AdServer\ViewPublic\Stats.php(21): XenCentral_AdServer_ViewPublic_Stats->_renderObjects(Array)
#3 D:\WWW-PROD\lx\production\library\XenForo\ViewRenderer\Abstract.php(227): XenCentral_AdServer_ViewPublic_Stats->renderJson()
#4 D:\WWW-PROD\lx\production\library\XenForo\ViewRenderer\Json.php(88): XenForo_ViewRenderer_Abstract->renderViewObject('XenCentral_AdSe...', 'Json', Array, '')
#5 D:\WWW-PROD\lx\production\library\XenForo\FrontController.php(572): XenForo_ViewRenderer_Json->renderView('XenCentral_AdSe...', Array, '', NULL)
#6 D:\WWW-PROD\lx\production\library\XenForo\FrontController.php(158): XenForo_FrontController->renderView(Object(XenForo_ControllerResponse_View), Object(XenForo_ViewRenderer_Json), Array)
#7 D:\WWW-PROD\lx\production\index.php(13): XenForo_FrontController->run()
#8 {main}
Request State
array(3) {
  ["url"] => string(207) "http://site.com/ads/stats/generate-zone-clicks-time-stats?from=2013-10-01&to=2013-10-16&filter%5B%5D=1&currentDataId=0&_xfResponseType=json&_xfToken=2%2C1381927810%2Cab074f37ed4ebe10e8a3f8925467fefa89544980"
  ["_GET"] => array(6) {
  ["from"] => string(0) "2013-10-01"
  ["to"] => string(10) "2013-10-16"
  ["filter"] => array(1) {
  [0] => string(1) "1"
  }
  ["currentDataId"] => string(1) "0"
  ["_xfResponseType"] => string(4) "json"
  ["_xfToken"] => string(53) "2,1381927810,ab074f37ed4ebe10e8a3f8925467fefa89544980"
  }
  ["_POST"] => array(0) {
  }
}

We found out that this is a conflict with this Addon: http://xenforo.com/community/resources/bd-widget-framework.297/

If we disable the [bd] Widget Framework addon, the reports will run.

Not sure if you can adjust your addon; or provide a work around. If you need more details, please ask. Site information is masked in the above content for privacy.

Thanks.
 
Last edited:
It looks a lot like OpenX Community Edition but that's not a bad thing! ;)

A killer feature would be, if you could ad a asynchronous loading. So if i add a html code (for example webmasterplan), the banner would be loaded asynchronous, so the page speed wouldn't depend on the banner loading time.

If that would be included, i would by it in a minute!
 
Hello, @Crazy-Achmet

Asynchronous loading is already supported. Ads are small HTML code with a a link to dynamic JS file that has "defer" attribute, therefore it loads separately from the entire page. You can easily notice that at http://demo.xencentral.com/ , on the top right of the page you will see text ad loading with short delay due to asynchronous request.

Thanks for the quick response. :)

You are welcome. Just let us know if you have any other problems.

Thank you!
 
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