Developing a highly customizable banner service
This title may take some work. Perhaps after reading this you can improve it.
Today my boss called me in and told me that a recent project we completed is now getting significant traffic and advertisers are starting to knock on our doors. I need to develop a method for rendering, tracking and customizing banners for various advertisers on our site.
My initial thoughts are that I need to create a couple of database tables. One for storing banners and basic information related to them. Another way to track impressions per day (maybe even an hour) and maybe even one to track specific click instances. I would like to offer the option of buying a predefined number of clicks, impressions, or an indefinite number of clicks / impressions before expiration.
I understand that this task can be quite large and very tedious, so I am curious what types of information would be useful to me before I start developing. What types of functions and variations should you perform, and what types of methods should you avoid?
The application I will be integrating this into is written in PHP on top of the Kohana Framework with a MySQL database.
If you know about an implementable solution, I will be interested to see it too.
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Best Practice: Try to find something that exists out there, possibly commercially available, before designing this home. This is the type of thing that used to be solved.
Update: Directions. I would list the requirements for the system that the focus is on:
- integration parameters
- Administrative functions
- advertiser functions
- reporting
- scalability
- cost (in terms of integration, licensing - monthly vs.% additions vs. fixed purchase price, etc.)
then Google should let you down (I can do your searches, but I can't judge which solutions will fit your situation, and there is little point in mentioning some of the products here). You can also talk to the people who run a similar site in business model, traffic and see what they use and what they like and dislike about it.
There might be a very good reason why you want to develop this in-house, but I haven't seen this in the question yet, and it also doesn't seem like adding services is your main business (that would be if you were Google Adwords or the Lounge ad network, etc.)
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