Review - phpAdsNew Banner Management System

Statistics

One of the things I really like about phpAdsNew is its powerful statistic and graphing capabilities. By simply clicking on the statistics tab in phpAdsNew, you're presented with detailed stats for each campaign you currently run:

For each campaign, phpAdsNew shows its ID, number of ad views, number of ad clicks, and its click through rate (CTR). Below the details of each campaign is a set of overall stats for all banners, including number of banners shown today, this week and this month, as well as number of clicks and CTR for each period.

On the statistics page, there's also two links to history and weekly statistics. If you click on the history link, then you'll be shown a tabulated list of days and the number of ad views, clicks, and CTR for those days. The weekly statistics link shows many of the same things, but in a weekly format.

Sometimes it's handy to have our banner stats available offline, and, as you'll see if you click on the reports tab, phpAdsNew supports this functionality. By simply choosing the campaign you're after, phpAdsNew will generate a file called campaignhistory.csv, which is a set of values separated by commas. By choosing to open this CSV file, my Windows 2000 server launched Excel, and it looked like this:

Of course I've only added one campaign to demonstrate how phpAdsNew works, but if you had dozens of campaigns, then Excel's chart wizard would allow you to create professional looking charts from your phpAdsNew campaign data, which can be used in your media kit to help persuade potential advertisers to advertise on your site.

Banner Rotations

One of the best ways to generate more revenue for your site is to set up banner rotations. As compared to normal banners, a rotation contains several (usually 5-20) banners in one ad space; a randomly selected ad from the set is displayed for each page view. Each advertiser gets a shared number of impressions, and rotations are great when you're trying to advertise similar products/services to a niche audience.

To set up a banner rotation with phpAdsNew, simply create at least two banners and click on the administration -> generate bannercode link. The what field allows you to specify the criteria for the rotation. For example, if you wanted to set up a rotation with all your 468x60 banners, then you would enter 468x60 into the text box.

You can also display banners in rotation based on their name. If you created two banners that both have the word 'test' in their name, for example, then you can specify 'test' as the value of the what field. All banners with the word 'test' in their name would then be displayed in the rotation.