Flash Banners

Article Topics: Ad Tools

The Flash Banners Ad Tool type lets you upload a flash banner of your choosing in order to help affiliates promote your site. After uploading, NATS will automatically pass an affiliate linkcode into your flash banner.

In order to take advantage of this feature, however, your flash banners should be able to utilize the input parameter clickTag. To do this, your flash banner or button should have an action code similar to the following:

Action Script 2

  on (release) {
    if (clickTAG.substr(0,5) == "http:") {
      getURL(clickTAG);
    }
  }

Action Script 3

  function goto_url(e:Event) : void {
    if (String(root.loaderInfo.parameters.clickTAG).substr(0,5) == "http:") {
      navigateToURL(new URLRequest(String(root.loaderInfo.parameters.clickTAG)), "_blank");
    }
  }
  movieClip_2.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK,goto_url);

For more information on adding links for tracking purposes to your flash banners, you should refer to this article: http://www.adobe.com/resources/richmedia/tracking/designers_guide/

Uploading a Flash Banner

After you have edited your flash banner to accept the affiliate input link and redirect a surfer, you will need to upload your banner to NATS.There are a number of ways to do this. The simplest way is to navigate to the Ad Tools Admin, go to the "Banners" Ad Tool category, and click the "+" button next to the "Flash Banners" Ad Tool type.

On the "Add New Ad Tool" page, use the available "Banner" field to add the banner image you want to use; you can upload a file from your hard drive, or input an image URL in this field.

Once you have selected a file to use as your new Flash Banner, you can define the other available settings for your banner. These settings include:

Enabled on - Choose what sites you want the banner to be enabled for.
Publish Date - Input what date you want the banner to be available from.
Default Group - Select an ad tool group to categorize the banner under.

Once you have defined the available fields, click "Add Adtool" to add your new image banner to NATS.

Your flash banner will now be displayed in the "Image Banners Adtool" table, along with the other available flash banners and basic information regarding that flash banner.

When you have done this, your affiliates will be able to navigate to their Affiliate Tools page and get an embed code similar to the following:

<embed height="60" width="468" name="plugin" src="demo_banner.swf?clickTAG=http://demo.nats4.com/track/MS4yLjAuMC4wLjIzLjAuMA" 
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />

Please Note: For Default Affiliate skins, the embed code for the flash banner in the affiliate view will ONLY show with the following link styles: Encoded with HTML, Un-Encoded with HTML, and Shortname with HTML. Specific Affiliate Linkcode Display Settings may need to be adjusted.

If you would like to show both a track link and an image link, you can check TRACK_BANNER_IMPRESSIONS in the configuration admin under misc.

Displaying an Image Banner

Before you can include your new Flash Banner on one of your sites, you must first add a "SHOW" rule. To do so, click on the "Add a new rule" action icon next to your new image banner. On the next page, simply add a "SHOW" rule type for the affiliate(s), program(s), and site(s) you want this banner to be enabled for. You can also choose to enable this banner for all affiliates, programs, and sites.

For more information on rules in NATS, please see our Rules article.