Tags: Thirty years ago, on October 21st 1978, Frederick Valentich disappeared in unexplained circumstances while piloting a light aircraft towards King Island, Australia. Valentich had reported via radio that an unidentified craft flew at high speeds dangerously close to his plane and later hovered over his aircraft. Radio contact was lost soon after this report, and no trace of him or his plane was ever found. Our condolences go out to the friends and family of Mr. Valentich on this anniversary. We are definitely intrigued by the circumstances which point to a possible UFO encounter. Or perhaps it was just an advanced plane being tested by the ever powerful and meddling Australian Army. Or perhaps it was a vehicle from the future being joy-ridden by some time travelling teens from the year 2000.
This doesn’t have much to do with today’s topic, but it is an example of how sometimes extreme intros are needed in order to draw users from their RSS reader onto your website to read the full article. Adding simple banners into your RSS feed would be a useful way of gathering lost impressions due to those RSS lurkers who won’t click through to your article even if you promise that the full article will have the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Serving banners into your RSS feed is actually pretty simple to accomplish, but there are some limitations. Some quick notes:
- You can’t be quite sure what tool a client is using to read the RSS feed and what limitations that tool has. To be safe, you should avoid Javascript and other rich media (flash, video).
- Your RSS feed is likely to have quite a few entries on one ‘page’ so you probably won’t be using different zones, but will repeat the same zone ID repeatedly.
- You don’t want to alienate your RSS readers. Don’t over populate the feed with banners, keep them tastefully placed and make it obvious that they are banners and not actual content.
So, to accomplish this with OpenX all you require is:
- An image banner (or three [or four]). These can be added as Local Webserver, Local SQL, or External Image banners.
- A banner zone with the above image banner(s) linked to it.
- The image invocation tag for the above zone.
Now, you will need a bit of knowledge of how your website works to create the RSS feed. You will want to add the image invocation tag to the file which generates the RSS feed. This will vary depending on your CMS/blog/forum/homemade software.
The important part is that you need to add code to the invocation tag to make it function as best as possible. The tag looks like this:
<a href='http://demo.openx.org/delivery/ck.php?n=a3b54d5d&cb=INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE‘ target=’_blank’><img src=’http://demo.openx.org/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=23&n=a3b54d5d‘ border=’0′ alt=” /></a>
You need to make sure that the ‘n’ variable is unique for each invocation tag output to the screen - however the value should match within a tag (meaning: the <a> tag and <img> tag should have the same value, but the following set of <a> and <img> tags should have a new matching value). This is explained in this FAQ. A useful value to use for the ‘n’ variable would be the article ID, as each article should have a unique ID. If you don’t have a unique value for each invocation tag, or if the values don’t match within a tag, then the banner click-through won’t function properly.
The other action required is to replace ‘INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE’ with a … you guessed it … random number! This is explained in this FAQ. However in that example Javascript is used, which we want to avoid. So instead you should just generate a random number using whatever programming language your site uses. The number needs to be randomly generated on each page impression to ensure that a viewer’s browser does not cache the banner image or the click destination (the ‘cb’ variable name stands for ‘cacheBuster’).
So, using basic PHP the image tag in the end might look something like this:
<a href='http://demo.openx.org/delivery/ck.php?n=<?php echo $article[ID]; ?>&cb=<?php echo rand(); ?>‘ target=’_blank’><img src=”http://demo.openx.org/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=23&n=<?php echo $article[ID]; ?>” border=”0″ alt=”" />
And after the page is generated it will look something like:
<a href='http://demo.openx.org/delivery/ck.php?n=28&cb=12343‘ target=’_blank’><img src=”http://demo.openx.org/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=23&n=28” border=”0″ alt=”">
A real life example, using OpenX, can be seen on ReadWriteWeb’s RSS Feed.
Hopefully this article shows you that it really isn’t too complex to achieve and that advertisers are likely to be very interested in such placements. Make sure that any advertisers you sell directly to know that you can deliver into your RSS feed and they will most likely wish to have separate rates for RSS vs. non-RSS impressions. They may want to see some historical CTR stats of the RSS banners first.
Does anyone have experience with the pricing and results which they’d like to share, or about the technical requirements for placement of banners in their RSS feed? Please share!
