All,
I am super happy to report that after many years of trying, I finally got DoubleClick For Small Business (DFP Small Business) to work with Ning. And I didn't have to hack my site to make it work. Here's what I did.
First, what is DFP Small Business and why should you care? Basically, it's a free advertising engine for websites. The idea is simple. You designate space on your page for sale (your inventory), and then you rent that space to advertisers. In my case, I create a top banner ad on My Site that is 982 pixels wide by 100 pixels tall (982x100) at the top of all pages and I let folks buy ads in that space. This is a super easy way to make some money to help pay for Ning Pro, eh?
But that's not all you can do with it. You can have multiple ads running in a single ad space, and DFP automatically rotates them for you. Think of the possibilities. If you don't have advertisers lined up, you can easily create your own banner ads for your own members as a way to say thanks for their contributions. Or promote your favorite charity. The possibilities are endless.
To get this to work, all I had to do was turn on the native Ning ads. You can do this in your Ning Management Dashboard under "Features Layout" at the bottom where it says "Instant Ad Boxes". Be sure to at least add an ad box to the top of the page, even if you don't put anything in it. We will use that to put our DFP script tags. This is important since this is what fixed it for me.
Once you've got that, you need to create an account on Google DFP For Small Business. Then follow their tutorials for creating the Inventory item and then the Orders Line Items. Upload your creatives and approve the new ad. If you've completed all the steps, the new Order Line Item should have a status of "Ready". Once ready, the ad will begin to deliver the creatives in about 30 minutes time. When it delivers the first creative, it will change the status to "Delivering".
Now, to finish the process, we need to add the tags and Javascript to our Ning site to tie it all together. Google makes this process super easy by providing a way to generate all of that for you. If you click on the Inventory tab in DFP, there is an option to "Generate Tags". When you click that, it asks you to choose the site inventory you want to generate tags for. In my case, I chose my 982x100 ad slot from inventory, and it generated the necessary code for me.
Now, here's where things got super easy. I just went to my Ning site and clicked "Edit" on the Ning ad box I added earlier at the top of my page. I clicked "HTML" in the text box to edit in raw HTML, and then I just pasted all the generated code that Google generated for me into that box. There's two parts. The first part you paste is the header part. Put that in first. The second part is the Ad Units part (in the document body), and you paste that below the first one. Click Save, and you're done. The ads begin to appear in about 30 minutes.
If anyone needs any help with this, let me know. I can post some screen shots and stuff. But you should be able to get this working following the basic example I've outlined above.
Good luck, and happy Ninging,
Michael
http://www.texasbluesroadhouse.com
Replies
Well, thanks to you guys for adding that new ad option in the Dashboard. That top ad position apparently sits towards the top of the Document Object Model, so putting our scripts there is about as close to having them in the Head section as possible. This approach will probably work for any script that folks need to initialize on page load.
Hi Michael!
Thanks for the tip. However, I am relatively surprised. This has always worked for my site (www.voile-rc.com)... And I didn't have to hack my site to make it work too. I don't understand where is the news - sorry, maybe it's my poor English skills that do not allow me to understand everything what you say :-(
Pierre
You're English is fantastic. If you click on the "DoubleClick" tag above, you'll see all three threads that I've started on this subject. I've been trying to get it to work for three years. Numerous people in those threads said they were able to get it to work. But when I tried their technique, it didn't work for me. At one point, someone suggested uploading some custom JavaScript using what I consider a hack. That's when I gave up.
I'm posting this here to let people who've struggled with this know that it's now very easy. It may have been easy for a long time. I'm sure there was some user error on my part. I just hope it helps other people. Lord knows I needed the help earlier.
Thanks,
Michael
Ok, I want to share some other cool things I've been able to do with this. DFP for Small Business allows you to designate ads that only display if the visitor to your site is from a certain geographical location (GeoLocation). I'm using this feature to help promote some of my Groups. I've got a group for the Dallas blues scene, one for the Houston blues scene and one for the Austin blues scene. If a user comes to my page from one of those areas, I display a welcome banner inviting them to learn more about their local music scene. If they click the banner, it takes them right there. Pretty cool.
Have you gotten DFP to work for specific pages of the network only, i.e. ads appearing in a sponsored Group, for instance.
Does this limit us to only one placement? As the same head tag will be on every page?