How To: improve adcode

now most major publishers have a similar approach to adcode as what I will outline. First I will go over the basics of a piece of adcode and what is needed. Then I will address the different types and finally list what can be improved in traditional adcode and how to do it.

Adcode Elements:

what we should look at first is the URL for the impression call of any piece of adcode. The elements that will make this up are:
1. Domain - this will call the server where the adserver is
2. Call - there will usually be a part that defines what kind of adcall it is, impression, click, and also what it should return
3. Site and location - variables that match to the targeting within your adserver
4. targeting - these are varibales that may or may not already be stored in your adserver. These fine tune the targeting
5. size/adtype - to define how big the ad is and what type of ad
6. other variables - different adserver will pas through different variables dependant on what is needed to use it's capabilities
7. cache buster - usually ord= or random=

Splitting the elements:

if you look at these elements you can see that some are used for all tags on a site (site, domain etc), some are used for the page (location, some targeting) and some are used for only that particular adunit (size, ord). So we code that is printed out several times for a site, or a page that only needs to be put in once. Why don't we group these variables and use javascript to write them out when needed

Advantages:

what we are going to do is make functions that will put in the code as needed when needed. What this allows is a change in one place to change all code for the page/site as opposed to changing all parts of the code. This makes code cleaner and easier to adjust. It also makes code easier to implement. If there is code already for the page, all we need to do is put in the code for an island to have an island appear - in fact one piece of island code could be put on any page

and it should pick up the site and page variables automatically. Also the code is non-adserver specific, so if you ever change adservers, you only need to change the file that hold the main methods - no changes to the site necessary

Method:

what we should do is create a separate .js file that holds methods to create the random cache buster and to automatically put in site variables. We then need a function that will set page variable dependant on what is passed in from the page. The final function we need will use the variables already set and variables passed in from the actual ad to write out the code.

an example of page code:

script src=" adcode.js ">/script>
script>
site = "site";
createSiteVars(site);
location = "location";
createPageVars(location);
/script>

then to call an ad:

script>
callAd(300,250,"javascript");
/script>

for extra bonus points, host the external script file with all functions somewhere you can access it so that you can hack away and make changes to site coding in a second if need be. Some examples of different implementations are whitepages.com.au and thevine.com.au