Google Admanager Integration
 

Notice: This mod uses Re-usable Code, so please feel free to port it to vbulletin 4 under your username. Thanks.

Google Admanager Integration

This product targets ads to usergroup, script, forum. That way you can

• address ads to these targets.
  Example: Target all users except moderators in your favorite forums on index and forumdisplay directly in Google Admanager! (see Attachment 88883)
• Adsense Advanced Statistics. Have a detailed view which usergroups, scripts, forums bring best adsense results. You have a detailed view about all targeting values.
  Example: You see that your announcement forum has a CTR of 8% and an eCPM of 25 $. Unregistered users bring an eCPM of 15 $ while registered users only have an eCPM of 3 $.

By the way a maximum of 6 adsense ads are allowed, when using Google Adsense in combination with Google Admanager.

1. Install product
If you upgrade: Allow Overwrite: Yes

2. Change template headinclude
If you upgrade please also do this. Add to end of this template:
3. Google Admanager Configuration
Configure Admanager like I write in #2 post in this topic.

Version History
9.11.2008 1.2 Solved a bug for forum targeting
8.11.2008 1.1 Improved forum targeting. Forums are shown with real names. Unlimited forum levels supported.
1.11.2008 1.0 Forums are targeted by using forumids. 3 forum levels supported.

Works with vbulletin 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8. This product works perfectly with vbSEO. This product doesn't make the vBulletin 3.8 implementation of Adsense work with admanager.

Google Admanager > Inventory > Targeting

Targeting Key: usergroup
Copy & paste:

Code:

---

1
2
3
4
5
6

---

Targeting Key: script
Copy & paste:

Code:

---

index
showthread
forumdisplay

---

Targeting Key: forum
Copy & paste only this forum structure you get here:
www.yourforum.com/misc.php?do=admanager Login as administrator

How to

• Target Custom Primary Usergroups. To target custom primary usergroups, add their ids on Google Admanager > Inventory > Targeting > Target Key: usergroups.
  
• Integration Tips. Place following ad slots and target thousands of forums, usergroups, script combinations
  • ad slot named superbanner on ad_header
  • ad slot named rectangle on ad_navbar
  • ad slot skyscraper on ad_footer

FAQ

For text ads, go to Upload Creatives for and then choose: Creative Type: Rich Media. Then you can enter any html code you want, including text of course. Great to know is, that in "Rich Media" you can also enter another Google Admanager Placement code! That way you can put Google Admanager Adsense Placements in your Creative Types that are trackable within Google Admanager including all its analytic skills!

Great work!

Thanks, I am really happy about feedback and will improve this product the more feedback I get. Please click "Install" if you use this product. Thank you https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2011/01/19.gif

Great mod! It would be really nice if we could manage more ad locations as well as control forums from the admin cp.

What ad locations do you want to control more? Do you mean by that more scripts? Now we only have index, forumdisplay, showthread. Do you want to control more scripts?

What do you mean by control forums from admincp?

I like feedback and build more options into this mod if I find more ideas :)

Update :)

8.11.2008 1.1 Improves forum targeting. Forums are now shown in their real names within admanager. It's also taken care of converting forum names to names consisting of characters google allowes.

When upgrading please also change headinclude template. Replace old f1, f2, f3 attribute codes with this code. And please update Google Admanager Targeting Key : forum!

great hack, thanks

thorsten, I have a problem.

Let's say I have 1 ad slot, the same one in all my forums.
In the forum B I'd like to have the specific banner 1 all the time.

I targeted banner 2, 3 and 4 putting "forums not equal to B". Still they do appear in forum B and banner 1 doesn't. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks

EDIT: Actually no part of the targeting is working, usergroups & script either :-(
EDIT2: I have > 100 forums and the names are sometims too long

I have updated this product:

9.11.2008 1.2 Solved a bug for forum targeting. If you upgrade, install product (overwrite: yes) and update headinclude template. Thanks.

I hope this helps adressing forum targeting error. Long forum names are no problem as long as there are no two forum names that have same name after normalization. Google Admanager allows you to have up to 200 values per targeting criteria. You can just put the forums within admanager you like to track.

Targeting usergroup and script works fine for me. Please note, that it takes up some really long time for admanager to adjusts custom targeting criterias.

How exactly is the adcode injected? I have a heavily modified forum - how does your script know where to place ads?

Google Admanager knows about targeting criterias from your modified headinclude template (step 2 of product installation).

• Usergroups are fetched by $bbuserinfo[usergroup]
• Script name is fetched by THIS_SCRIPT
• forum names are fetched by product which fetches actual forum title and all parentforum titles via $foruminfo[parentlist]. It also normalizes all titles to match google target value criterias.

Hi Thorsten, this wasnt really my question but thanks al the same.

I know how the adcode is targetted, but how does the script know WHERE in the page to place the ads.

Parts of my header are not definined in the header tempate. Parts of my navigation system are not defined in navbar template.... do you see what I am getting at here?

Surely there needs to be some token or script in the exact place where you want the ads to appear??

Maybe I am missing something here, who knows.

#1 You must put your adslots in template headinclude.
#2 You must put admanagers adcode in your page where it should appear.

Please note that you must do #1 and #2 to display ads for admanager. Regardeless if you use my mod or not.

My mod only takes care of targeting criterias. As these criterias are displayed on headinclude, and headinclude is always fetched within header, all sites that are delivered from vbulletin have this mods targeting criteria included.

Usergroup and Script are global values, so its no problem to put them in headinclude. Names of forums are not standard and therefore I have written this mod, which fetches them each time a site is presented. Hope I could answer your questions, if you have more questions, please ask!

Update. After waiting some time forum targeting finally works. Google Admanager takes really long time for custom targeting. After waiting for some days I can check my inventory with custom forum targeting.

Thank you for this mod. I've just installed it and am wondering if anything needs adjusting for those of us running vbSEO?

For example, vbSEO rewrites forum names to this format...

... where words are separated by a dash rather than an underscore.

I assume that you are doing your magic before vbSEO rewrites the URL (I haven't noticed any changes yet, but I've just installed). Or, should I rewrite the forum names using dashes before entering them into Google Admanager?

Please advise.

Thanks again. -- Rik

This mod works perfectly with vbSEO on my own forums. This mod takes original forum names for its own from vbulletin and changes its names to apply with google name rules. (Google only allowes for example a maximum of 40 characters which are only allowed to be alphanumerical).

As these normalized google admanager targeting forum names are of course different from original forum names I have programmed a small script (see post #2) that gives you this normalized list which you just have to copy&paste to admanager.

It is very important to only import this normalized list of forum names!

Thank you for your reply. I'm glad no adjustments must be made for vbSEO.

I'm looking forward to seeing targeting results.

Thank again. -- Rik

Has anyone tried this on 3.7?

Should work perfectly with 3.7!

Here's a stupid question...am I supposed to list the numbers of all the usergroups I have in Targeting Key: usergroup

I'm guessing...yes.

You just have to import 6 standard vbulletin usergroups:
Unfortunately it is impossible for me to automate Google Admanager Settings as they are not within vbulletin. But I hope it is as easy as it could be. If you have suggestions to make installation process more easy, you're most welcome!

If I have other usergroups (and I do), I can enter them in too? Will it work?

IDs from primary usergroups are sent to Google Admanager automatically. If you have more primary usergroups, they are sent to Admanager. To track additional primary usergroups, you can of course put their IDs in Admanager.

I added your question to FAQ.

I'm not currently using this mod and this is more out of curiosity than anything else, but would it be possible to allow ad targeting by thread tags - ie an advertiser could target all threads tagged with 'automobile repair' or 'french literature' or . . . anything. Seems to me that could be pretty valuable.

Yes, that would be easy to integrate.

Um this doesent work with 3.8?

This product was designed for 3.8.x and is working fine on my vbulletin 3.8 rc2 forum. Do you have any problems?

I want to include "how many posts has user" in targeting. I need your suggestions for upcoming version 1.3. Google Admanager only has string targeting values, so it does not know that targeting value 5 is less than targeting value 20. So it is not possible to say Google Admanager: Target from 5 to 20 posts. Instead you can only click on "posts: 5,6,7,8,9,10, ..., 20".

What values do you think should we put in this new targeting criteria posts?

Okay, this may be a dumb post but here is my situation. I am running google adsens ads right now on my website. Basically I would like all usergroups excluding people who donate and are senior forum members to have the ads. Is this the mod for me? Will it let me speficify which groups will see ads and which will not?

With this product you can target ads for primary usergroups. Custom private groups are also supported. Are your donators in a custom primary usergroup?

Anyway, this product may be a bit "overkill" for just target ads to usergroups. You can do that with conditionals.

Yes the donators are added as additional users to another custom usergroup

There are Primary custom usergroups and Secundary custom usergroups. Be sure they are in primary custom usergroup (so they are not in usergroup 2: registered users any more). You can also target secondary usergroups with this modification, it is a matter of five minutes.

Thanks for the answers and quick replies

I know it might be a tad off topic....I'm able to get all image ads served from GAM to show up inside actual forum posts. My issue is with text ads. Anybody have any tips or a way to serve them inside posts please ?

For text ads, go to Upload Creatives for and then choose: Creative Type: Rich Media. Then you can enter any html code you want, including text of course. Great to know is, that in "Rich Media" you can also enter another Google Admanager Placement code! That way you can put Google Admanager Adsense Placements in your Creative Types that are trackable within Google Admanager including all its analytic skills!

(added to FAQ)

Thanks, I know how to create text ads in GAM ;-)

When I use the html output from GAM to show all the ads, only the image ads work within the posts an NOT the text ads ?

Every ad types show up whereever you put them on vbulletin.

I have all the ads displaying perfectly when using them within the VB templates. My issue is when I try to include them in a post or announcement. Give it a shot...try posting a standard post and you'll see what I'm saying.