Developing a Highly-Configurable Banner Service

Question

That title may need some work. Perhaps after reading this, you may be able to improve on it.

The boss called me up today and informed me that a recent project we completed is now getting substantial traffic, and advertisers are starting to knock on our doors. I need to develop a method of rendering, tracking, and configuring banners for various advertisers on our site.

My initial thoughts are that I need to create a couple database tables. One to store the banners, and core information relevant to them. Another to track impressions per day (possibly even per hour), and maybe even one to track specific click instances. I would like to offer the option of buying a predefined number of clicks, impressions or an indefinite number of clicks/impressions before an expiration date.

I understand this task can be rather large, and very tedious so I'm curious what types of information should be helpful to me before I start development. What types of features and options should I implement, and what types of practices should I avoid?

The application I'll be integrating this with is written in PHP on top of the Kohana Framework, with a MySQL database.

If you know of an implementable solution, I'd be interested in seeing that too.

Answer 1

Best practice: try to find something existing out there perhaps commercially available before developing this inhouse. This is the type of thing that has been done a gazillion times before.

Update: Directions. I would make a list of requirements for the system focusing on:

• integration options
• administrative features
• advertiser features
• reporting
• scalability
• cost (in terms of integration, licensing - monthly vs % of adds vs fixed purchase price et...)

then Google should get you along (I can do the searches for you but I cannot judge which solutions will suit your situation and needs so little sense in mentioning some products here). You might also talk with people who operate a similar site in business model, traffic and see what they are using and what they like and dislike about it.

There might be a very good reason why you want to develop this in house but I haven't seen one in the question so far and it also doesn't seem serving adds is your core business (it would be if you are Google Adwords or the Lounge advertising network etc..)

Answer 2

PhpAds/PhpAdsNew/OpenX seem to be the accepted standard.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpadsnew/