Thank you very much for purchasing
Ad Manager Pro. Please read this Manual carefully, it contains useful information
how to install and use this script.
Introduction
& Info
Ad Manager Pro is an advanced script for running an
ads management system. You can have an unlimited number of zones and/or keywords,
unlimited number of ads and ad types. Each of ad may be used in 1-5 campaigns,
each campaign has its own configuration and statistic.
You can use the system for your own purposes only but you also can sell clicks
and/or impressions and/or days to your advertisers. Additionally you can have publishers - partners who
place ads of your advertisers on their pages and earn money. These unique features
allow you to create a complex advertising network.
What is ...
Zone
- A place where you and/or your publishers display ads. You can use the same zone on one ads
spot (if
you need individual statistic for each spot) or on many ad spots, it's on you.
Zones
are also used by advertisers and publishers. Publishers make their offers in a zone, advertisers buy
their impressions, clicks or days in a particular zone. A zone, defined by the admin, is a
connection between advertisers and publishers.
Keyword - Another way to display ads on your pages. For example if you have a search
engine system (like Link
Up Gold), this feature can be
used on search result pages of this search engine. Let's say that someone searches
for the word "car", your search engine system displays links regarding
this word and Ad Manager Pro displays ads for which you have defined word "car"
as keyword. Each campaign can use one or more keywords.
Note: The system
needs more system resources to display ads based on keywords. If you'll use
only ads based on zones, your system will work faster.
Default
ads - Ads which are displayed if there is no one "normal" ad available
(which is enabled, approved, has clicks or impressions) for the required zone
or keyword. Make sure to define at least one default ad for each zone and
keyword. Default ads have some limitations (for example their clicks and impressions are not
counted), we recommend to use them as little as possible.
Advertisers
- Your customers who pay for clicks, impressions and/or days. They can submit their
ads to the system and exactly set the days and hours when each of their ads should be
displayed. They also can set how many clicks, impressions or days should be used by
individual ads, they even can set Maximum number of clicks or impressions per
day.
Publishers - Your partners who display ads on their pages for
money. There are used "publishing places". Each publisher can have
one or more places. The system is able to track hits only from the exact URL
approved by admin or from the whole domain or from any place on the Net - it
depends on your configuration. Publishers can be paid once or twice a month.
Statistic
Ad Manager Pro offers many pages with statistic, there is available overall statistic (since you installed the system), monthly statistic, statistic for each day and also statistic for each hour of the current day. The overall statistic is always a real time but the statistic for the months and days may be delayed several hours.
Styles
There
are several styles available, each style has its own subdirectory in directory
"styles". Each of these subdirectories contains a styles.css
file where are defined all colors and fonts of that style. All default styles also
contains images, these are used for backgrounds of tables and pages. You
can freely edit the styles.css files as well as images, you also
can edit templates of each style, create new styles and delete existing styles.
The "styles" directory should always contain at least two subfolders
- a folder of the default style (for example Blue) and the folder _common with
all default files in it. Templates in this folder are used by default, for those
styles which don't have their own templates.
If you created new style of
deleted an existing style, go to Configuration and save the form. This step
updates the list of styles.
Templates
All public
pages are based on templates - these are normal HTML or text files
editable in your favorite HTML or text editor. If possible, we recommend to use
a plain text editor (Notepad, Crimson Editor, NoteTab, First Page 2000, HTML-Kit
and so on) because WYSIWYG editors (like FrontPage, DreamWeaver etc.) often
add unwanted tags or removes required items, this will cause an error. However if you use any WYSIWYG editor make sure that your
editor don't modify hidden fields of forms. Also note that the original templates
are not complete HTML pages - the header and footer are included automatically
by scripts (take a look below for more info) so if your editor adds
header and footer tags (<html><header> .... </body></html>)
to your templates, the finished pages will have these tags doubled.
Most of templates contains
special
tags which look like #%someword%#. Scripts which display pages replace
these tags by their values (i.e. ad title, some numbers and so). Templates can be found
in directory styles/NAME_OF_A_STYLE/templates. Styles which don't have
it's own templates and/or messages or have only a few of them use "common"
templates, these are stored in folder the _common. In other words,
when the script needs to create a page, it searches for the required template
in the folder of the style which is just selected. If the required template
is missing in that folder, it grabs it in folder _common.
Templates
with HTML extension are always used to create complete
HTML pages. Templates with TXT extension are used for fragments
of HTML pages (for example for a single link which should be repeated several
times on one page) or for emails.
HTML
Templates
At the top of each page is automatically added content of template _head_public.txt (public pages), _head_publisher.txt (pages inside publishers user area), _head_advertiser.txt (pages inside advertisers user area). At the end of each page is automatically inserted content of template _footer_public.txt (public pages), _footer_publisher.txt (pages inside publishers user area), _footer_advertiser.txt (pages inside advertisers user area). You can use these files to add some data to each page. It may save you a lot of time when you will need to change something on all pages.