Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Once you have all your images cut and saved to the cut_art
folder, it
s time to start importing them into Flash for animations
and interactions based on the direction that was determined in the
planning phase of your banner.
'
clickTags and Links
To know how your banners are performing after you have
released them into the world, you
'
ll need to track a couple of
things. For instance, you
ll need to know how many people have
clickedthemandwhatsitethosepeoplewereactuallyonwhen
they did so. So how do you get this information? Whether your
ads are hosted by the site on which they run or by a third-party
ad-serving company, such as Atlas Solutions or DoubleClick, you
will use a tracking tag. That tracking tag will contain the actual
URLyouareattemptingtodriveuserstoandastringofsee-
mingly random letters and numbers that are generated by the
tracking application. Once users click your ad, they are directed
to the landing page URL while seamlessly passing information to
thetrackingapplication.
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One or Many
Unless the site or ad-serving company tells you differently, you
will most likely be using a variant of the variable name
“
click-
Tag
(ClickTag, clickTAG, and so on) to link out of your units.
Check with your site or ad server on the actual name you should
use if you will be linking to a single landing page URL as some
will ask that you add the number
”
to the end. For example,
ad-serving company A might ask you to use
“
1
”
“
clickTag1,
”
whereas
ad-serving company B might ask you to use
“
clickTag
”
(without
the
). When linking out to multiple URLs, most ad servers
handle it the same way: clickTag1, clickTag2, clickTag3, and
so on.
Prior to ActionScript 3, you didn
“
1
”
t really need to worry about
case sensitivity for the actual name of the clickTag variable. How-
ever, that has changed now, and since the ad-serving companies
haven
'
t agreed on a standard yet, some of them will use clickTag,
whereas others use clickTAG or ClickTag or even ClickTAG. This
can pose a serious problem when you are creating your ads
because if you test with
'
and then launch only to find
out that the ad-serving company is using
“
clickTag
”
“
clickTAG,
”
those ads
aren
t going to work, and they will most definitely be removed
from the sites on which they were running. So how do we handle
this? Do we have to keep track of which variant of clickTag each
ad-serving company is using? I suppose you could do that, but it
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'
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