Create your own Banner Management Application

Step 2: Displaying and tracking banners, impressions and click-thrus

By now you should have created the four pages that I described in part one: addbanner1.asp, addbanner2.asp, banners.asp and delbanner.asp. You should save these pages in some sort of admin folder and use your Web server to configure the security permissions on this directory so that a username a password is required to access your banner scripts.

Having said that, I’ll now demonstrate the code we'll use to retrieve a banner from our database, display it on our Web page and track both impressions and click-thrus for each banner.

Displaying a banner on your Website:

No doubt you’ve been to thousands of Websites that display banners across the top of the screen. These could be 468x60 banners, 460x60, 215x125 etc. The point is that banners are the most popular form of advertising on the Internet.

To display a banner from the database on our site, four steps are required as pictured here:

Create the following code and save it to a file called bannercode.asp

<%@ Language="VBScript" %>    
<!-- METADATA Type="TypeLib" File="c:\program files\common      
files\system\ado\msado15.dll" -->    
<%    
 function GetBanner()    
   dim objConn    
   dim objComm    
   dim objRS    
   
   dim strBanner_VirtualPath    
   dim strBannerHTML    
   dim intNumBanners    
   dim intRandom    
   
   set objConn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")    
   set objRS = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")    
   
   strBanner_VirtualPath = "/banners/"              
   objConn.Open "Provider=SQLOLEDB; Data Source=localhost;    
Initial Catalog=myAdStuff; UId=sa; Pwd="    
   objRS.ActiveConnection = objConn    
   objRS.LockType = adLockReadOnly    
   objRS.CursorType = adUseForwardOnly    
       
   objRS.Open "select count(*) from banners"    
   intNumBanners = objRS.Fields(0).Value    
         
   if intNumBanners = 0 then    
     exit function    
   end if    
   
   Randomize    
   intRandom = int(rnd(1)*intNumBanners)      
   objRS.Close    
   objRS.Open "select * from banners"    
   objRS.Move intRandom    
   
   strBannerHTML = "<a href='bannerclick.asp?bannerId=" &      
objRS("bannerId") & "'><img border='0' src='" & strBanner_VirtualPath      
& objRS("bannerImage") & "'></a>"        
   Response.Write strBannerHTML    
   
   objConn.Execute "UPDATE banners SET bannerImpressions =    
bannerImpressions + 1 WHERE bannerId = " & objRS("bannerId")    
   objConn.Close    
   
   set objConn = nothing    
   set objRS = nothing    
   
 end function    
%>

Now, let's break down the unfamiliar code...