Flash Banners and Tracking Ad Clicks with AdRotator Control
ASP.NET developers have an easy out of the box solution to display and manage banner ads, it’s the well known server control AdRotator. AdRotator displays randomly selected advertisement banner on the web page and the displayed advertisement changes when the page is refreshed.
Working with AdRotator is straightforward:
- Place the control on the web page,
- Define the list of banners in XML file,
- Set AdvertisementFile property to the location of the XML file containing advertisement information.
That’s all the work you need to have banners on your web site. It’s nice and simple, but soon you will find some limitations of AdRotator:
- It can display only image banners – you cannot use flash banners.
- There is not an easy way to track clicks on your ads.
This can be a problem for web site developers, because a significant percent of the ads you find on the web today are flash banners.
The solution is to extend the control, and create an inherited asp.net web control, doing this we retain all the functionality of the AdRotator and we add some new. (more…)
4 commentsWednesday, October 24th, 2007