Making money off of your Web site, Part 1: 
implementing a banner ad service using ASP

by Jason Salas, KUAM.COM June 19, 2001

"While many truly great local sites are pushing their sites to become more and more a vital part of their organization's core business strategy, so few actually do an effective job of marketing themselves on their natural medium - the Web.  If you have no means of tracking how well (poorly) your banner is doing, what's the point?"

As the Web became more and more of a massive commercial push mechanism, this likewise and logically brought about new opportunities with which to make money.  Possibly the largest measurement of a site (or any business endeavor for that matter) is what revenue(s) it generates.  One of the more popular and easy methods of generating revenue for sites has classically been through the use of banner ads - those pesky little graphics which adorn Web pages and entice the user to click on them.  On KUAM.COM, a significant portion of our total online revenue is generated through the use of the banner ads which appear on the more popular sections of our site.

One of the things that continues to puzzle me as a local Web developer/marketer is the fact that while many truly great local sites are pushing their sites to become more and more a vital part of their organization's core business strategy, so few actually do an effective job of marketing themselves within their natural medium - the Web.  Sure, it's nice to have your URL emblazoned across your TV ads, letterhead, calling cards and other business paraphernalia, but where on the 'Net can one find information about your site --- and do people even know it exists?

The biggest thing to remember is that to effectively generate a return on investment when you host a banner ad service, you have to show clients that their ads are in fact working for them.  This is primarily proved with documentation that the client's banner(s) are actually being clicked on.  Personally, I'm big on number-crunching, so this is very important to me, and I assume that it would be for others, as well.  This data should be used in conjunction with the normal logfile analysis of which clients should be doing on their own sites anyway, to let them arrive at a true measure of the effectiveness of their online marketing campaigns.  Also, traffic levels of the hosting site itself should be provided to the client, so that he can further assess the effectiveness of his advertising program.  If a site gets 50,000 hits per month, but the banner only gets clicked 1,000 times, this is a cause for concern.

I know several on-island sites who offer banner ad programs, but don't provide any traffic statistics back to the client.  Understand that this is a wasted investment.  If you have no means of tracking how well (poorly) your banner is doing, then what's the point?  (Coincidentally, if you happen to be one of those people who enjoy liberally giving money away, give me a ring and you can wire some money into my bank account). 

The task then of the Web developer should be the development of a system which effortlessly and appropriately places and tracks the clickthroughs of all of the banners placed on his site, in order to satisfy his clients and sustain future business.  Also,  those sites which are new to the game and are still building credibility can use this same schema to run their own internal banners and practice the ageless capitalist tactic of shameless self-promotion.  This lets people know just how big and diversified a site really is, and can call attention to portions which perhaps are being missed out by the normal Web surfer.

We're going to look at the first of two methods of placing and tracking banner ads on a site, using an object component inherent to Microsoft's Active Server Pages platform - the MSWC.AdRotator component.

Banner advertisement rotator process using VBScript & the MSWC.AdRotator object component

The MSWC.AdRotator object component for ASP is a standard component which the developer can manipulate to fit his own site's needs.  It displays, keeps running track of, and manages dynamic banner advertisements on a Web site using ASP.  The component ships as part of ASP 2.0, running on Microsoft Internet Information Server 4, as part of Windows NT Server (say that three times fast).  The current version as of the time of this writing is ASP 3.0, running on IIS 5.0 as part of Windows 2000 Server, or Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The bannerset itself is a simple text file that defines the banners to be displayed, and how often. 

This method displays a defined bannerset which can be inserted on a page through a single installable block of VBScript code, provided the page is an Active Server Page, (named with an extension of ".ASP").  You can start by downloading the entire banner ad application here.  Make sure to review the README.TXT file first for instructions on how to configure the banner ad rotator component.

Requirements:

• your host provider must support ASP, most commonly by running either IIS 4.0 or later (although you may setup and test the application in production environments using Microsoft Personal Web Server, or a third-party ASP parser such as Sun Chili!Soft ASP).
• the file GLOBAL.ASA must sit in the root directory of the Web for the process to work properly.  This file defines application-level parameters which manages the banner hit log.

Example:

• In our example application we'll be rotating 3 banners, one each for The Bank of Guam, Alupang Beach Club, and Today's Realty.  The banners are dynamically generated and rotate when the page "index.asp" is reloaded.
• The pages included are as follows:
  • README.txt - instructions on how to configure the banner ad rotator system
  • README.doc - instructions on how to configure the banner ad rotator system (in Microsoft Word)
  • index.asp - a sample page displaying the banner and linking to the banner hit log
  • adschedule.txt - the configuration file describing the size of the banners, the rotation frequency
  • banneradredirect.asp - processes the banner click and redirects the browser to the destination URL
  • global.asa - application information about logging the clicks on banners.  This file must sit in the root directory of the Web site.
  • logfile.asp - the banner hit log for the application
  • adrotator.zip - the entire application as a portable fileset
• If the banners are clicked on, the destination URL is loaded in a new browser window, and the banner hit log records a clickthrough.
• The banner hit log keeps a running tab of all of the clicks on each banner, and displays this information to the user.

After you configure the files in the system to match your banners, you'll need only to insert the following VBScript codeblock into an existing page making sure to rename the file with an extension of ".ASP".  For example, you could save the file into a directory on your Web server named "/pages" with the path: "/pages/index.asp"  rather than "/pages/index.html".

That's it!  Have fun...be creative and make lots of money on your site!

Next week, we'll be taking a look at how to manage a banner ad schema with JavaScript.