From Wiki

Introduction

Banners are popular methods of linking to merchants. They are small standard sized images that advertise your website and any products on it. However, you will find that they represent the lower proportion of your click through to your website. For this reason, Affiliate Window recommends that you create at least one of every different size and then offer your creative services to your affiliates, for custom made banners and linking methods.

Suggestions for Graphical Banner success:

• Create one of each size

  *Standard Banner (468x60), (300x250), (728x90)
  *Skyscraper (120x600)
  *Small Button (120 wide)
  *Static Banner, Text Link

• Link directly to products (You can link to homepages, but product banners have a higher conversion rates)

• Add offer related banners

• Constantly update/refresh your banners with new offers

• Creating advanced banners such as Search Banners/Drop Down Banners

To access the banners and links in your account, please see the image below.

This will open up the banners and links screen allowing you to upload various type of creative banner content.

Creating Banner Groups

Before you upload banners you need to define the sizes of the banners. You can achieve this by creating a new group, select the parent type ‘Banners’, the ‘Type’ (size)and the ‘Group Name’. We recommend that you make it as descriptive as possible, so that affiliates can easily see which groups contain which banners e.g. ‘Spring/Summer range’. The ‘Default clickthrough’ should contain the full URL to the website you wish that banner to go to, this will be used by all banners in this group by default.

Uploading Banners

Once a banner group is created, you will need to add the banners you have to it. Simply click the folder option for ‘Add link’ on the right hand side of the screen, on the following page click the ‘Browse’ button in the box and select the banner you wish to upload. In this box you can also set the alt-text for the banner, this is the text that appears under the mouse cursor, when it is hovered over the banner for a few seconds.

You can also choose a custom URL for this particular banner; for instance, if it advertises one particular product or service you can link it directly to that page on your website. You can add as many banners you like to one group, bearing in mind that all banners within a group have to be the same size.

Deleting a Banner or Group

To delete a banner group, click the ‘Delete’ option on the right hand side of the group you want to remove.

REMEMBER: this deletes all the banners in the group as well. If you delete a group that the affiliates are using it will leave a blank image on their website.

Banner Type & Banner Sizes

Banners

• Standard (468x60)*
• Half Banner (234x60) *
• Small Button (125x125) *
• Small Buttons (120x60) *
• Skyscraper (120x600) *
• Micro Bar (88x31) *
• Leader (728x90) *
• Other Sizes

Dynamic Marketing Tools

• Active Scroller
• Dynamic Text Link
• Application Forms
• Competitions
• Search Forms
• Surveys
• Top Picks
• Inline Frame

Static Makerting Tools

• Email Newsletter
• Promotional Email
• Promotional Text
• Keyword List
• Static Text Link

Flash Banners

• Flash Standard Banners (468x60)
• Flash Half Banner (234x60)
• Flash Square Button (125x125)
• Flash Non Square Buttons (120 wide)
• Flash Skyscraper (120x600)
• Flash Micro Bar (88x31)
• Flash Misc Other Banners

* - our Ad’s conform to IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Guidelines, see more information at http://www.iab.net

Restrictions

Please do not include your URL/telephone numbers. Affiliates prefer not to use banners which have a URL featured in them, because it could encourage customers to type the URL into their browser causing the sale not to track through Affiliate Window.

File Size

We do not have any strict restrictions on file size. Affiliates do prefer banners to be small as possible as they will load quicker on their website.

Adobe Flash™ Banner links

Adobe Flash™ banners work in much the same way that graphical banners do, although they can be more interactive, animated, generally better looking and tend grab visitors attention far more than a standard graphical banner. They can also contain a large amount of information and interactive content to an affiliates website, so a visitor can already have a good idea of the website that he is about to visit by clicking on the banner. We advise merchants to use Flash creative to display more interactive and advanced creative.

Creating Adobe Flash™ Banners

Whoever is creating a Adobe Flash™ banner or microsite for use on the Affiliate Window network, should adhere to the following recommendations by Adobe™ http://www.adobe.com/resources/richmedia/tracking/designers_guide/ This specifies that the following object action should be used for any buttons or links in the banner that go to the merchants website:

ActionScript 2.0

on (release) {
		getURL(clickTAG, "_blank");
}

OR

on (release) {
  if (_root.clickTAG.substr(0,5) == "http:") {
    getURL(_root.clickTAG, "_blank");
  }
}

ActionScript 3.0

The code for ActionScript 3.0 Flash Banners is slightly different to ActionScript 2.0. The code needs to be added onto a Layer Frame as opposed to ActionScript 2.0 where it is added onto the clickable object itself.

Please replace MyClickButton with the instance name of your flash button (banner):

MyClickButton.addEventListener(
  MouseEvent.CLICK,
  function():void {
    if (root.loaderInfo.parameters.clickTAG.substr(0,4) == "http") {
      navigateToURL(
        new URLRequest(root.loaderInfo.parameters.clickTAG),
        root.loaderInfo.parameters.TargetAS
      );
    }
  }
);

NOTE: clickTAG must not be surrounded by “quotes” Affiliate Window handles the assigning of the variable for clickTAG and the HTML output when the banner is shown on an affiliates website. We accept a number of variations for the clickTAG, these being:

• clickTAG
• clicktag
• clickTag
• clickTaG

Uploading Dynamic Creative Iframes

What is an iframe?

IFrame (from inline frame) is an HTML element which makes it possible to embed another HTML document inside the main document.

The size of the IFrame is specified in the surrounding HTML page, so that the surrounding page can already be presented in the browser while the IFrame is still being loaded. The IFrame can contain its own scroll bar, independent of the surrounding page's scroll bar.

For more information please click here.

Video Creative

To have video creative enabled for your merchant account, please view here for further information.