Ad Juggler and Web Administration for Microsoft Windows NT Server

Anyone involved with a Web site knows a Web site isn't cheap to run and maintain. The Windows NT Magazine site, like many others, incorporates paid advertising to help support it. Posting ads is easy, but keeping track of the number of ad impressions (the number of times an ad banner appears) and click-throughs (the number of times a user clicks on an ad banner) for our advertisers and our ad sales department can be a big job. I use a mix of Internet Information Server (IIS) 3.0's Active Server Pages (ASP--for information about ASP, see Keith Pleas, "IIS 3.0's Active Server Pages," page 127) and Cold Fusion (for information about Cold Fusion, see the review, "dbWeb and Cold Fusion," April 1996) to record these advertising statistics to a SQL Server database. This method works well, but it can be a resource hog and requires that I create a user interface (UI) so that clients can access statistics for their ad banners.

With more than 2.5 million ad impressions each month, I have a lot of stats to maintain. I recently discovered digitalNATION's Ad Juggler for Windows NT. The software has been around awhile for UNIX users, and digitalNATION recently revamped the software and ported it to NT. This package offers everything our ad sales department has been asking for and then some. Ad Juggler gives us an enormous amount of control over each client's banner from a very friendly interface--any Web browser.

Ad Juggler Installation and Setup
Installing Ad Juggler is a breeze--you just run the executable file and fill in the blanks. You then use your browser to access the Ad Juggler interface to start entering accounts. From the main menu you see in Screen 1, click Add New Client and fill in the blanks on the subsequent page, as shown in Screen 2.

You can see that Ad Juggler performs a lot of the ad banner maintenance for you. Ad Juggler lets you set up the parameters for an ad before you even start. For example, you can set all the parameters for an account and never have to reconfigure the ad unless the client wants to extend its time online.

On the new client screen in Screen 2, you specify the client name, an email address where Ad Juggler can automatically mail reports, a password so that the client can access the ad banner stats, the choice of whether you want detailed logs, and the client status. The client status has three options: Auto, which takes a client's banner out of rotation when you reach any limit set on the account; Active, which keeps a banner active regardless of its stats; and Hold, which stops a banner from rotating while letting the client access the ad banner stats.

The part I like is the limitation you can apply to a banner's rotation. If you set the client status to Auto, you can also set a start and end date to specify when the ad banner enters a rotation. Alternatively, you can set how many times Web surfers can view or click a banner. You can also evenly disperse a banner's impressions over a given period. For example, suppose a client doesn't want to pay for a slot in your regular rotation schedule but is willing to pay for 100,000 impressions over a month at a reduced rate. If you put this client's banner into your regular rotation, you can use up all the impressions in less than a week. But with Ad Juggler, you can set Impressions distribution in Screen 2 to Even, and the software will take the number for the Max Impressions setting, divide it by 30, and show that number of impressions each day.

In addition, you can select how often you want to email a report to the client. You can set the software to email a report based on the number of ad impressions, click-throughs, or days. This feature is especially nice for clients who don't want to take the time to view their stats but still want updates on how their ads are doing.

Clients who want to keep close tabs on their ads can visit a personalized stats page to see up-to-date numbers for their ad banners. Screen 3 shows what clients see on their custom pages. Clients can see what images are rotating in the lineup and the numbers of ad impressions and click-throughs associated with those ad banners. This screen also lets clients change how often reports are emailed to them. The rest of Ad Juggler's controls are accessible from only the main menu, which is available to only those users who have the administrative password.

Screen 3 shows two ad banners. Ad Juggler lets you set up multiple banners for each client's advertising campaign while still maintaining one set of stats.

Ad Juggler also has a Pool option so that you can set up different rotations for different pages. For example, you can have several clients in group A who want their banners on only certain pages, and you can still maintain a group B with several clients who want their ad banners everywhere else.