IP.Nexus Dev Update: Advertisements

IP.Board 3.1 has a great advertisement system. Administrators can specify code to appear in certain locations around the community to display banner ads.
With IP.Nexus, it seemed logical to expand this to allow members of a community to purchase advertisement space.

In order to do this, when you install IP.Nexus, the advertisement system in IP.Nexus will override the system in IP.Board. Even if you're not planning on selling advertisement space, the system in IP.Nexus allows you to set up multiple advertisements (for rotation), automatic expiry, per-ad permissions and other features.


Setting up your own Advertisements

The Admin CP has a page which lists all advertisements currently running on your community. These could be ones created yourself, or ones purchased by a user.


Here you can add your own advertisements. You can specify either raw HTML code, or an image URL and link URL. The latter is required for click tracking.
You can also specify which groups cannot see the advertisement and if it should expire after a certain number of clicks or impressions.

The table indicates how many clicks and impressions each ad has received. When it has reached its limit, it will expire and become inactive.
You can manually edit the current number of clicks or impressions the advertisement has by editing it.


Advertisement Packages

In order for a user to be able to purchase advertisement space, you will have need to created at least one advertisement package. These define the terms such as where the ad will show, who it should not show to and how many clicks/impressions it will last.


You can manage your packages in the Admin CP.



Purchasing Advertisements

A user can purchase advertisements in their User CP.


They can select a package, provide the URL for the target link, and either upload or provide a URL to an image.
For security reasons, and to allow click tracking, users cannot provide raw HTML.

Once a user has purchased an advertisement, it must be approved by an administrator. An Admin CP dashboard notification appears if there are pending advertisements, and unapproved advertisements will be highlighted on the listing page.

To approve an advertisement, you would just click the cross indicating it is not currently active.

When a user selects his purchase in the client area, a page will display the status (approved, pending approval, expired) and the current clicks/impressions of the advertisement.




How advertisements are displayed

IP.Nexus will display whatever ad is appropriate for each location. If there are no advertisements set up for a location, none will show, and if multiple are set up, one of the appropriate advertisements will be selected at random to show. This is calculated on each page load, however, advertisements are cached based on the appropriate location, so advertisements are not pulled on every page load to save resources.
Each time an advertisement is used, it's impression count is increased. When an advertisement is clicked on, it's click count is increased. IP.Nexus will automatically disable an advertisement after it has reached it's allocated number of impressions or clicks.