Tag Archives: features

Coming up: GeoTargeting for mere mortals!

I hope to *finally* release a big update to AdRotate and AdRotate Pro sometime next week. It took a lot of testing and trying to get it right but I finally came up with a useful GeoTargeting solution.

What does this mean for you? Time to shake up your sales pages and get some new advertisement packages going.

Publishers:

You can now sell adverts for specific areas. As wide as a country (or selection of countries). Or a series of cities.
No longer does your Long Beach coffee shop advert have to show up globally. You can fine-tune all of this. You can sell per city or general region.

getlocation-groups

geolocation-ads

As you can see in the screenshots, it IS very easy to use. Type in a bunch of cities OR select a bunch of countries. And that’s about it. On top of that there is the option to allow your advertisers to use this option as well, if you allow them to make their own adverts.

Advertisers:

Target your locale with more precise adverts. If your shop/business/endeavor is for Japan only. You can target that country. Or a few cities in Japan. It’s all possible now. If the admin permits you, you can create your own localization by selecting countries or cities.

The power of geoPlugin and MaxMind:

AdRotate always had a reliable way of getting a users IP address. This strength is now turned into a super-power by matching that IP against the excellent database of geoPlugin. geoPlugin uses some data from MaxMind – the popular and renowned IP database specifically for targeting specific audiences.

Thanks to Jack T. from bullettmedia.com who suggested I use geoPlugin. geoPlugin which is a free-ish service provides a basic package for free for anyone willing to register. Of course if you like what they do and you want to help them out make a donation via Paypal or upgrade your account to a premium package. Check out their website for more information.

Interested in AdRotate development? Take a look at the development page or get in touch.

AdRotate Blocks – What needs to be done

Recent versions of AdRotate have introduced some new methods and some experiments have been conducted to see where and how Blocks can be made more open and useful.

State of blocks

People wanted a CSS approach to things so blocks as a whole are more configurable in regard of looks. This partly succeeded but introduced a few quirks and less optimal situations for some users. Side effects if you will.

I’m looking to resolve all that but at the same time want to do something cool with Blocks. Not just patch up the inconsistent experience people are having now.

So think with me here

What can I do to make blocks cool again? Any CSS tricks that would resolve the current inconsistent experience are welcome. I’ve tried a number of things but none work everywhere it seems. Fixing it for browser A while breaking browser B is not cool. And for that reason I’m leaning against ditching the CSS code entirely and go back to how it was in AdRotate 3.7. But… I kinda not want to admit defeat to CSS ;)

What would make blocks more useful to you? Feature requests here please. Useful stuff, motivations why you need it. As you may know I’m open to a lot of things – But it has to make sense!

Valuable input ofcourse will be weighed in for future versions. Changes are likely to be made but at the moment I’m not sure which direction blocks should go. A wild idea… Should AdRotate support blocks at all? It probably does… In some form or shape. But perhaps a complete rewrite of the concept is in order.

An idea that kinda keeps popping up is to ditch Blocks entirely and create a widget that allows for groups and the widget handles that in a smart way with a templated approach. And another is to just not support blocks at all. But I think many people use Blocks.

Results

The goal obviously is to make things easier for you. While providing good, easy to use features without too much headaches.

Your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments.

Exporting Statistics on AdRotate – Which format makes sense?

As you may know, AdRotate has supported exporting of statistics for some time now.

At the time I went with CSV files because that made sense for a client back then. But I’ve never really looked at other options. What sort of file do you want/require to make this feature more useful and more “now”?

I know Excel is a viable option. But as I am not much involved with the reporting side of advertisements (personally I’ve never even used the exporting options) I am not sure what the going file format is.

What would be your format of choice and why? Please give your thoughts in the comments below. Also motivate your ideas.

Submit your thoughts

For AdRotate 3.8 a lot of new features are planned and of course there is the birth of a Pro version. For many users this will mean some changes. The regular version will lose some less used features and the Pro version will gain a lot of new features and improvements.

But, there are probably a bunch of things in terms of functionality I didn’t think of so here’s your chance to voice your vision on AdRotate.
The one button you always wanted. Feature X or Y you always missed but need.

AdRotate has a Development forum where you can post your ideas and outline your vision. I will respond to them all and a bunch of them will probably be included in the next or a future version.

Find the development forum here: http://forum.adrotateplugin.com/Forum-4-adrotate-plugin-development

Blocks wrapper and how it will work.

After my earlier post there has been some ‘unrest’ about the wrapper code being removed in a future version.

Enough so to make me reconsider removing it. The new wrapper functions were designed to co-exist with any custom CSS you threw at it. This means the current per-ad wrapper will ofcourse work just fine within the new wrapper. Just make sure you keep count of the margins and paddings.

Anyway, i’ve had numerous comments from people on how much they love the old wrapper and the new wrapper is not sufficient for their hackery and tricks. Fair enough. Not being able to type your own code does impose some limits. So the wrapper will stay. As some suggested, even expanded. But for now it just stays the way it is.

This means that for novice users, you can use the new wrapper, setting the options it provide. More advanced users can use both, or ignore the new wrapper (setting the margin and such to 0) and use the wrapper as you always did.