Something Interactive

I am creating a unique set of banner advertisements for a client of mine and after quite an exhaustive search, without having to actually force myself or anyone into creating an AdWords account to glean more information I managed to come up with a list of how I believe Google AdWords advertising works with flash banners:

1. in your AdWords account, you create a campaign
2. the campain has details for keywords and descriptions of the campaign for relevance
3. you then input the destination for the campaign banners (http://www.yourwebsite.com/destination/)
4. then you upload your set of banners to the campaign (swfs, gifs, jpgs, or pngs)
5. then you pay for an advertising exposure package (how much money determines the quality of your campaigns exposure on Google’s advertising network)
6. the rest, is all done by Google’s servers and their advertising network

Google’s advertising partners must all have a specific set of javascript codes on their website to handle the banners embedded on their website by Google.
If your banner shows up on XYZ.com,.. then XYZ.com’s website has this javascript code to handle the ClickTag embedded in that Flash banner.
As well, XYZ.com’s website already knows to go to the destination (http://www.yourwebsite.com/destination/) because it got it from Google (when you gave it to Google in your campaign in your AdWords account).
Google dynamically provided your campaign destination to their advertising partners, only when the banner was displayed on their ad partners’ websites.

In the meantime, the ClickTag, also allows Google to record how many people have clicked on a specific banner – and this allows them to provide a whole set of statistics based around the campaign – whether more money needs to be invested in the advertising, or maybe the banner needs to be more eye-catching.

I found a website that explains the latest Actionscript 3 code to put into Flash (for Adobe Flash CS3 or CS4) for banners to be effective on Google’s advertising network of partners:

http://www.genelu.com/content/view/98/1

I hope this explains things a bit better, and regardless the banner should end up working once it’s uploaded to Google AdWords.

Well I must say that this is pretty cool!
Adobe Flash .. your days are numbered, the only thing you’ll be good for is video,.. then again, html5 has that too.

Raphaël—JavaScript Library.

When you find yourself coding a website for multiple browsers and get all caught up with going to the extremes of using browser hacks just to try and meet your personal visual standards verses the W3C compliant standards, you find yourself at a crossroad where both standards are at jeopardy.

What do you do? Which standard should you favour?

You’ve got to make a decision on what is most important, and while you may not like the result, you can justify it with this simple reasoning I read in a blog comment from Brad Czerniak that perfectly sums up how you should approach the solution:

I personally don’t find it necessary for everything to look exactly the same in all browsers, and this is a good example of a place where a minor difference makes a modern browser look good and a legacy browser still function properly.

Take the extremes of web design/development: you want to make the content still accessible on the worst of browsers (ie LYNX), yet display the content as beautifully as possible if they have the best and latest browser versions (ie Firefox 3).

What are the tools/browsers of your ideal audience?
When and how do you show your antiquated audience that they’re missing out?
When and how do you reward your savvy audience?

Lastly, where will you draw the line?