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My thoughts

Mon, 10/29/2007 - 08:53 — joemcdoe

I tried out the ads on my site today but I have problems with these:

- Thumbnails are all varifying sizes
- Displayed items don't vary, I get the same three items all the time.
- Text sometimes displays below the image or to the side depending on the size of the image.
- I couldn't change the colour of the text links. I inputted my own value and the swatch updated the reflect this, but it didn't show up in the ad.

I've put back Auctionads for now. The fact that I don't need a CJ PID and the cheap pricing scheme are very attractive.

 

cheers,

Mark

 

‹ Earnings per day Flexible destination tool ›
Mon, 10/29/2007 - 15:45 — admin

a couple answers

Hi Peter--

The links color issue was a recently introduced glitch and now it's fixed.

Thumbnails are kept at the aspect for the particular image -- within the thumbnail size you pick.  Hmm -- there's nothing that we can do to force displaying items that have an aspect of 72x96.

We are working on a caching system that will get new items from eBay every 5 minutes, but that is about a week from being done (develop / test).  The plan is to rotate through all returned items for your keywords, so that every 5 minutes new items are displayed.

About the search bringing back the same few items every time - and some of them aren't really good matches for your keywords... I've researched this for an hour and it seems that this is due to our returned items all being from US based sellers.  For example, go to eBay and do an advanced search for your keywords with the "Preferred Locations" selection at "US only".  We'll certainly be looking into making the default search as "on eBay.com" rather than "US only".

Mon, 10/29/2007 - 16:30 — admin

Your search works now

Hey Peter,

Could you check the results of the ad one more time?  I was able to add a single line of code and it seems to create an ad that looks just like the one you wanted - except for the text wrapping below the images for some.  For the text wrapping issue, it seems that your ad is not wrapping like this anymore.... this all depends on how wide the ad and thumbnails are - since there is only one image / text layout option where the image is to the left, the text would wrap if your ad was not as wide or if the thumbnails were larger.

Please let me know if the image layout / text wrapping will not be satisfactory for you.  On one hand, we don't want to add any more options (such that it overwhelms the user), but on the other hand -- the usefulness of this one option may be needed.

PS:  Nice web site by the way ... ;)  I am just too busy these days to surf around for articles like yours, but it brough back fond memories!

thanks, Brian
Tue, 10/30/2007 - 08:16 — joemcdoe

Hi Brian, I didn't have much

Hi Brian,

I didn't have much chance to experiment today but I see the text problem has been fixed. I prefer the text to be below the image for these thin vertical banners to give it alot more space so it reads well horizontally.

Being able to adjust the price text would be nice, but as you said you want to keep things not to complex.

Anyway I can't put up the ads due to the lack of items rotating, but you said you'll have them very soon.

I'll have another try during the week when I get more time.

Glad you liked the site!

regards,

Peter

Thu, 11/01/2007 - 14:32 — admin

Image / Text layout

We now have a new option "Image / Text layout" at the bottom of the Appearance Customization Settings.  Here you can select centered or left aligned images.  When centered, the text is always below the image.  Also, the customization form was modified so that warnings of possible size issues take the new layout into consideration.

Also, there has been a system wide caching implemented.  When the initial request occurs for one of your pages, the code gets 5 times as many results - and randomly rotates through them.  These are associated with your specific ad / keyword search combination.  This caching system also helps to make the ads display slightly faster since there is only one "hop" for when I grab items from the database cache... otherwise, it was always three hops (1) Web page to AuctionReporting -- (2) AuctionReporting parses ad code and requests from eBay -- (3) eBay response.

Let me know if you have any questions.

thanks,

Brian
Fri, 11/02/2007 - 06:33 — joemcdoe

Hi Brian, Thanks for the

Hi Brian,


Thanks for the latest round of improvements! With the product rotation, I can put them up on my site now and it's looking good.

I have 3 questions:


1) I'm getting tons of this message below. Is there an option of alternate items or something?

One of your ads was not able to return any results. Alternate items were displayed that did not match your query as well.
This page has been queued for a keywords scrape. If they the subsequent keywords do not return results, you can override by setting a searchterms parameter.
Search query: "japanese idol dvd"
Published on: "http://www.sweatpig.com/category/misc/"


2) There is alot of white space between each product (at least in a 160 x 600 banner, 1 col x 3 rows). If it this empty space was removed I could fit in another row, or at least fit in some other advertising below the ads.


3) With Auctionads, since the query was visible in the embedded code, I could create a php function to randomize complex queries such as

$query[1] = "idol dvd -american -dogs -foots";
$query[2] = "xbox -accessories -games -headphones";

Is there any way to do this with AuctionReporting?

I would like to have the query "Japanese Idol" or "Japanese Idol DVD" and perhaps a few alternates like "Yua Aida" etc to significantly increase the product range which I can't get with just "Japanese Idol DVD".

cheers,

Joemcdoe

Fri, 11/02/2007 - 14:07 — admin

Programmable parameters

Hi Joemcdoe,

1)  This was just an oversight.  The user messages were not supposed to be appearing for your account ads and I deleted them and fixed the glitch.  To explain a bit - the code that loads from the set of items is the same code that is called when the eBay request returned no items... it loads existing items from the AuctionReporting database cache tables; this procedure needed to differentiate between a failed call and having the item ids passed to it for loading.  These messages should only occur when your ad asks eBay for your query -- and it returns no items.  Sorry for the scare.

2)  Can you try the ad with 4 rows instead of 3?  Also, you could change the thumbnail size and height.  You basically control the size of the whitespace with the parameters for layout.  If you just add one row, it seems that there is not enough space -- but increase the height and add a row seems to work well (add rows=4&height=620& to the block) .  You can either create a new block with these sizes, or simply hard-code your web to add whatever modified parameters to your existing block (see #3).

3)  I can say that we didn't plan for handling more than one query per ad, but there are several parameters that you can override by passing them as name - value pairs.  I have a couple pages here that you should refer to:  programming info and some examples.  Fields that allow override values are "Search Query" (searchterms), sellers (sellers), store name (storename), width (w), height (h), rows (rows), columns (cols), page background color (outc), link color (linkcolor), text color (fontcolor), border color (cb).

 

I am not sure if we want to handle alternate queries / random alternates due to the user complexity - it would be tough to incorporate but not impossible to code.  We want to provide a more successful advertisement for webmasters.