Campaigns

Use this interface to manage your campaigns and creatives.

Here you see a list of all active campaigns in the database. Click on the arrow to reverse the sort order. Click on any column header to sort by that column.

By default, you see campaigns marked "Active", "Inactive", and "Suspended". To see campaigns with other statuses, you can check and uncheck the boxes at the bottom of the form and hit "Filter".

Click on "Add Campaign" to add a new campaign. To edit a campaign, click on the name of the campaign.

Here you see the details of a campaign. Use "Save" to save changes. Use "Delete" to delete the campaign and all associated creatives (you cannot delete a campaign while its status is set to "Active"). You will be prompted to confirm your decision if you opt to delete a campaign.

Use "Copy Campaign" to copy the campaign (and all its creatives and section assignments). A new campaign will be created with identical parameters, and with "Copy of" prepended to the name.

Name
Enter any name you like for the campaign. This name will show up on reports and invoices. Choose carefully.

Advertiser
Select an advertiser from the drop-down list.

Status
There are a number of different status settings for campaigns:

Start Date
You do not have to enter a start date unless you have an impressions target specified or a fixed cost for the campaign, in which case you must have a start and an end date.

End Date
You do not have to enter a end date unless you have an impressions target specified or a fixed cost for the campaign, in which case you must have a start and an end date.

When an end date is set, the campaign will stop delivering at midnight of the day following the end date (ie., the campaign will run through the entire end date.

Days of Week / Hours of Day
You can specify that a campaign only run on certain days of the week or certain hours of the day. By default, campaigns will run 24/7. In general, it is best to use this option only with campaigns that have no impressions target set, as you may end up making it impossible to meet the impressions target.

Please note that if you select an hour, the campaign will run from the beginning of that hour until the beginning of the next hour. So if you select 8 a.m. through 5 p.m., the campaign will start running at 8 a.m. and stop running at 6 p.m.

If you have selected specific days of the week or hours of the day for the campaign and then specify different days/hours for the creatives, the creatives will only run on the days or hours where the campaign's selections and the creatives' selections overlap. So for instance, if the campaign is set to run Monday through Friday and the creative is set to run Friday and Saturday, the creative will only run on Friday. If a campaign is set to run from 5 a.m. to noon, and a creative in that campaign is set to run from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., the creative will not run at all.

Impressions
Enter the number of impressions to be delivered for the campaign. If you enter a number here, you must have start and end dates specified.

You can leave leave this blank (or set to 0) and the campaign will still run, but at a lower priority. All campaigns with impression targets will run first each hour, with the rest picking up whatever is leftover.

Deliver
This setting determines how the campaign will be scheduled to meet its impression target. You can have the delivery done evenly by day, week, or month.

Weight
This only matters if you have Impressions set to 0. If so, this represents the relative weight between the campaigns. For example, if you have one campaign with a weight of 5 and another with a weight of 20, the second will run 4 times as often as the first. Keep in mind that campaigns with Impressions=0 run only after those with non-zero Impressions values have gotten their hourly targets. The default weight for a campaign is 10.

CPM
Enter the CPM (cost per thousand) here. You can leave it empty or set it to zero.

CPC
Enter the CPC (cost per clickthrough) here. You can leave it empty or set it to zero.

Fixed
Enter the fixed cost of the campaign here. You can leave it empty or set it to zero. If you set it to non-zero, you have to specify a start and end date for the campaign (for invoicing purposes). Also, select how the fixed cost is to be paid:

Agency Commission
If there is an agency commission involved, enter the percentage here. This will be applied to the total charge of each invoice and will be deducted from the net amount due from the advertiser.

Purchase Order
If the advertiser is using a purchase order to place the buy, enter the number here so that it will appear on the invoice.

Force Invoice
If this box is checked, invoices will be generated for this campaign even if CPM, CPC, and Fixed are all 0.

E-mail Reports
A list of e-mail addresses to which should be sent weekly reports of the campaign's performance. Separate multiple addresses using commas. By default, the e-mail address supplied for the advertiser should appear here. You can remove it if you like or add more to it.

Note
Use this space to enter notes about the campaign. These are not used by the software at all.

Creatives
If the campaign has creatives, they appear on this screen. To edit a creative, click on its name. To add a new creative, click "Add Creative".

Section Assignments
If the campaign has been assigned to sections, they appear on this screen. To change the sections to which this campaign is assigned, click on "Add/Remove Section Assignments".

Here you see the details of a creative. Use "Save" to save changes. Use "Delete" to delete the creative (you cannot delete a creative while its status is set to "Active"). You will be prompted to confirm your decision if you opt to delete a creative.

Use "Copy Creative" to copy the creative (and all its section assignments). A new creative will be created with identical parameters, and with "Copy of" prepended to the name.

Name
Enter any name you like for the creative. This name will appear on reports, so you might want something fairly descriptive.

Status
There are a number of different status settings for creatives:

By default, a creative is set to "Active". If it has an end date or impression target set, when it hits either, it will be set to "Completed". You can set it manually to "Cancelled" if you need to stop it from running.

Dimensions
These are automatically filled in when you upload an image file or enter a ThirdParty URL, but you can override them. Do so at your own risk.

MIME Type
This is automatically set when an image is uploaded or a ThirdParty URL is entered. OASIS currently recognizes (with the help of ImageMagick's identify program) GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs.

Clickthrough URL
The URL to which a user will be redirected if he clicks on the banner.

Weight
This is the weight of this creative relative to the other creatives in the campaign. This only matters if the creative does not have an impression target set. The default weight for a creative is 10.

Impressions
You can set an impression target for a creative. Suppose the campaign is scheduled for 100,000 impressions. It has two creatives, and you want to make sure that one gets exactly 200,000 impressions. You can set this here. (Note that setting the weight of one creative to 1 and the other to 4 would have almost the same effect, but there would be no guarantee that the first would get exactly 200,000 impressions).

Of course, you cannot set this value greater than the impression total for the campaign.

Also note that if you set this value to a number less than the impression total for the campaign, you must have another creative to "pick up the slack", that is, the sum of Impressions for all creatives must equal the campaign total, or there must be at least one creative that has Impressions=0.

Third Party
If this ad is a third-party redirection, enter the other ad server's banner URL here. Use the special tag [CB] for a random cache-busting number:

http://ad-adex3.flycast.com/server/ad/WRALOnLine/FlycastROS/?cb=[CB]
At delivery time, [CB] will be replaced with a random number to prevent caching.

Start Date
The start date for the creative. By default, it will just use the start date of the campaign. If you set this to something earlier than the campaign's start date, the campaign's start date will override.

End Date
The end date for the creative. By default, it will just use the end date of the campaign. If you set this to something later than the campaign's end date, the campaign's end date will override.

When an end date is set, the creative will stop delivering at midnight of the day following the end date (ie., the creative will run through the entire end date.

Days of Week / Hours of Day
You can specify that a creative only run on certain days of the week or certain hours of the day. By default, creatives will run 24/7. In general, it is best to use this option only with campaigns/creatives that have no impressions target set, as you may end up making it impossible to meet the impressions target.

Please note that if you select an hour, the creative will run from the beginning of that hour until the beginning of the next hour. So if you select 8 a.m. through 5 p.m., the creative will start running at 8 a.m. and stop running at 6 p.m.

If you have selected specific days of the week or hours of the day for the campaign and then specify different days/hours for the creatives, the creatives will only run on the days or hours where the campaign's selections and the creatives' selections overlap. So for instance, if the campaign is set to run Monday through Friday and the creative is set to run Friday and Saturday, the creative will only run on Friday. If a campaign is set to run from 5 a.m. to noon, and a creative in that campaign is set to run from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., the creative will not run at all.

Section Assignments
If the creative has been assigned to sections, they appear on this screen. To change the sections to which this campaign is assigned, click on "Add/Remove Section Assignments".

This is the section assignment screen. It looks almost identical for both campaigns and creatives. On this screen, you see the entire section tree, with the option to "Include", "Exclude", or make "Exclusive" the campaign/creative on a particular section.

Each hour, the maintenance script assigns creatives to sections, propogating these assignments down the section tree. They are processed in this order:

  1. Campaign Includes
  2. Creative Includes
  3. Campaign Excludes
  4. Creative Excludes
  5. Campaign Exclusives
  6. Creative Exclusives
In this way, creative assignments always override those of their parent campaigns. Also, exclusive assignments override all others.

Uploading a new banner is simple. From the creative editing form, click on "Upload new image". Hit "Browse..." to look for a file on your computer. Once you find it, click "Send File" to upload it. Assuming that it is small enough for its dimensions (the administrator defines a maximum size for each dimension of creative), you will be taken back to the Creative Details screen where you can edit the creative properties further.

You can edit rich media ads using this form. From the creative editing form, click on "Edit rich media". Then enter the width and height of your ad. You can enter any HTML (or for that matter, any markup language) you wish. This code may reference files on other Web servers, like images, Shockwave files, or Java applets.

To see what your rich media ad will look like in a browser, hit "Save". On the creative editing form, click "Preview rich media". A new window should pop up with your ad in it.

Note that rich media ads cannot be served if you're using IMG-based tagging (oasisi.php). You need to use either the embedded method or the IFRAME method. See the Tagging section of the manual for more information.

To track clickthroughs with Rich Media ads, you can use special tags in the creative's source (introduced in version 1.1.2):

[OASISCLICK:http://actual.url.here/]

will be replaced at delivery time with the appropriate clickthrough URL, and the resulting URL will record the click and redirect the user to http://actual.url.here/. The section, size, and creative will be recorded in the database when a user clicks on the link. You may include multiple clickthrough links in a single rich media creative, each with a different URL if you like.

Note that you can use the OASISCLICK tag in a standard HTML hyperlink:

<A HREF="[OASISCLICK:http://actual.url.here/]">

or you can do other things like pass them to Java applets:

<PARAM NAME="URL1" VALUE="[OASISCLICK:http://actual.url.here/]">

OASIS will tie the clicks back to the right creative. Unfortunately, if you have different links in the same creative, you won't be able to tell them apart in the reports at this point.