Banner ad products for Plone

Two of my clients recently asked for banner ad systems for their Plone sites. I took some notes on two of the products that are currently available, and I thought they might be worth sharing, so here goes...

I looked at two advertising systems for Plone:

• KBannerAd
• PromoEngine

KBannerAd

KBannerAd is an older product from the Plone 2.1 era, but I have tested it with Plone 2.5 and it does work without any problems, although there are a few UI glitches.

For creating ads, KBannerAd is simple to use. You create an ad using a tool in the Site Setup area. The ad object has fields for:

• an image (can be gif, jpg, png, or flash; text ads are not supported)
• a destination URL (either internal or external)
• a rotation weight
• effective and end dates
• location of the ad (ie, which portlet or banner slot)
• maximum clicks

Ad rotation is essentially random, but weighted - if ad A has a weight of 80 and ad B has a weight of 20, then over a few hundred page views, ad A will have been displayed approximately 80% of the time.

The lifetime of an ad is determined by the effective and end dates, and by the maximum clicks (whichever comes first). The max clicks allows the site owner to sell ads on a cost-per-click basis (meaning, the number of times the ad is actually clicked). The ad tool in Site Setup shows how many times each ad has been clicked.

Ads are controlled by workflow, so if an ad is not in a state accessible to the user, the ad will not be displayed.

PromoEngine

PromoEngine is a newer product, under active development using the latest Plone development techniques. It is only at version 0.5.1, but I have not encountered any problems with it in my tests.

For creating ads, PromoEngine is a bit more complex than KBannerAd, but with that complexity comes a bit more power in the ability to organize and display ads. PromoEngine uses a tool in Site Setup - you add folders under that tool to organize your ads. To each of these folders you can add subfolders, images, and ad objects. An ad object has the following fields:

• Reference field to associate ads with specific content
• The portlet slot (or banner location) where the ad should be displayed
• A Kupu editor to create the ad content - basically anything you can build in Kupu can be used for an ad, so you could have images, Flash, text, links, whatever. A catch here is that, for example, if the site owner is building a banner ad, they must remember to link the image to the destination URL. This is slightly more difficult than KBannerAd, which automatically wraps the banner ad with the destination URL.

The reference field is a good feature - it will allow you to run specific ads with specific content items (articles, etc).

PromoEngine does not have the max clicks and rotation weighting that KBannerAd has. The life of an ad is determined strictly by workflow and expiration date, and rotation is completely random. Weight is a planned feature, but is not yet implemented.

Common Shortcomings

• Neither system will do per-impression rotation.
• Other than the click counts provided by KBannerAd, neither system provides any type of statistics reporting.
• Neither system has the ability to manage the actual sale of ads
• Neither system can create a sized pop-up window when an ad is clicked (although this might be possible with PromoEngine, with some tweaks to Kupu).
• Since both systems serve ads directly in the HTML of a page, CacheFu page caching will prevent proper rotation of the ads.

Feature Comparison

Recommendation

Based on all of this, both of my clients have decided to go with PromoEngine, primarily because:

• It is a newer product, with active development.
• It allows the organization of ads into folders and subfolders in a flexible manner - you could organize your ads (and their associated images and other resources) by client, campaign, whatever.
• Rich-text (Kupu) creation of ads allows for more creativity in your ad design, and allows for text-only ads.
• Allows specific ads to be associated with specific content items.

Stuff I'd like to see

• The simple image+URL ad types in KBannerAd are nice, would like to see those in PromoEngine.
• A wrapper around a PromoEngine text ad, to make the whole thing clickable.
• A way to designate an ad destination as a sized pop-up window.
• Full reporting for views and click-throughs.

If work ever slows down, I'll try to find the time to contribute some of that. But working with good open-source projects is a double-edged sword - if you make the right connections and land some good clients, you'll find yourself too busy to contribute back to the projects!