Configuring banners

Banners are advertisement of various sizes displayed on the site. The Banners application also allows users to monitor statistics, namely impressions (banner views) and clicks. Banners are organized into categories, of which there are two types:

  • Global banner category - shared across multiple websites.
  • Site banner category - bound to a particular site and not accessible from the other sites.

The Banners application utilizes the Web analytics and Reporting applications to log and display how many times a particular banner has been shown on a page (number of impressions) and how many times visitors have clicked the banner.

On this page, you can learn about how you can configure banners on your site. Once banners are placed on the pages where you want to display them and configured, content editors can make use of them. Specifically, you can learn about:

Adding the Banner rotator web part

To add a banner to a page, you can use the Banner rotator web part. The web part offers more settings than the Banner rotator widget, that is designed to be used by content editors. The Banner rotator widget is limited to the CategoryWidth and Height settings.

The Banner rotator displays banners from a specified category. When you place the web part on a page, it renders the value stored in the Banner content property of the banner, encapsulated in an <a> (anchor) element.

To place the Banner rotator on your page:

  1. Open the Pages application.
  2. Switch to the Design tab.
  3. Place the Banner rotator web part. A Web part properties dialog opens.
  4. Adjust the web part properties. Hover over the properties for additional information.

Displaying banners

When a user requests a page that contains the Banner rotator web part, the web part selects a banner from the specified category and displays it.

The following factors are taken into account when selecting a banner:

  • The Enabled property of a banner must be true in order for the banner to be selected.
  • Current time must be between the Valid from and Valid to properties’ values.
  • The Impressions left attribute must have a value greater than zero.
  • The Clicks left attribute has to be greater than zero.

Another parameter that plays part in the process of selecting banners is the Weight property. The higher the weight of a banner, the more often that particular banner is selected by the rotator. The number is decimal, which means you can set a new banner between existing ones without changing their values. For example, if you have two banners with values 4 and 5, you can add a new one with weight set to 4.5.