AdSolution Sites and Channels
Purpose
The purpose of this guide is to help you understand the concepts of Sites and Channels within LongTail's AdSolution.
Introduction
To set up ad serving, you must first create one or more sites, and for each site you must create one or more channels. Together, these capture your ad serving settings and provide a mechanism for breaking out your reporting stats.
Managing Your Sites
A top-level domain is considered a Site or Website in the Dashboard. When you first sign up for the Dashboard you are asked for the site on which you intend to run ads. The site you specify will be created as the first site in your account. If you wish to use AdSolution on additional sites, then simply use the Add Another Site to This Account option under the Setup tab in the Dashboard. For each site, you must provide the URL of the site and a URL of a sample video on that site.
Each site that you create in Adsolution will be submitted to us for approval. You should typically receive confirmation of your site's approval status within one (1) business day. See our Terms of Service for information on reasons why your site might be not be approved. In addition to approval by LongTail, your site may also be submitted for approval to our premium advertisers. Consult our documentation on Premium Ads for more information.
You may edit or delete a site at any time by using the Edit This Site or Delete This Site option, respectively. Keep in mind, once your site has been submitted and approved, then you may not edit the URL or video URL associated with the site. If you delete a site, then all channels will be deleted and ads will no longer server for this site. You will always be able to see reporting data for both active and deleted sites.
Managing Channels for Your Sites
Once you have setup a site, then you will need to create at least one channel for the site. A channel contains your ad serving preferences. Use the Add a New Channel to This Site option to create a channel. When creating a channel, you must provide a name, category, description and keywords. This information may be used to improve ad targeting, so you should be accurate and descriptive. Avoid using too many keywords. 2 or 3 related keywords are far better than 20 unrelated keywords. For ideas, think about how a user might search for your content on the web.
You can create more than one channel for a given site. Typically, you would do this to allow the system to target ads more specifically and/or to separate out the reporting information. For example, if your website has two sections – one for basketball and the other for movies – you would probably want to create two channels. In the first channel, you might select “Sports” as the category and enter “NBA, Basketball” as keywords. For the second Channel, you might select “Entertainment” as the category and enter “Hollywood, Movies, Film” as keywords.
In most cases, only one or two channels for a site are ever required.