What Is the Difference Between House and Paid Ads?
Commerce Server Core Systems supports two types of ads: paid ads and house ads.
Paid ads are pieces of content to be delivered by Commerce Server Core Systems based on a specific formula for delivery. The formula for delivery is referred to as need of delivery (NOD).
House ads are pieces of content that are served when paid ads are ahead of the need of delivery schedule specified for them. For example, a customer orders 1,000 paid ads to be delivered over four months, but in the first two months the ad has been served 850 times. To balance the need of delivery schedule, house ads would be served.
House ads are critical to ensure the smooth delivery of your paid ads. House ads are also displayed when there are no paid ads eligible for the request. For example, a house ad would be served because all paid ads missed a required target.
You can use house ads to sell leftover inventory at discounted prices. You can also use house ads if the ads on the site do not have specific delivery goals, but you want to have the ads run at specified weights.
Ad Properties
Ad properties include the name of the ad, the type (paid ad or house ad), the weight or number of requests or clicks scheduled to be delivered (paid ad versus house ad), the exposure limit, and the industry associated with the ad.
Ad schedule is the start date/time and end date/time for the ad. You can select the days of the week on which the ad will be displayed, and what times of each day.
Ad target identifies the pages on which the discount will be displayed, and the groups it will be targeted to.
Ad display identifies the size of the ad, the type (for example, image, text, or HTML), and if needed, the image and/or URL that the user can click to go to another page (or Web site). You can display ads as images, text, HTML, non-clickable images, Buy Now ads, Windows Media Services, or vignette. (A vignette ad is composed of text that is displayed adjacent to the image where the ad is displayed.)
You can display an ad with a different currency than the preferred currency of the site. For example, if a user selects yen as the preferred currency and U.S. dollars is the currency of the site, the ad displays in U.S. dollars. As the user browses through the site, the user views all product prices in yen, but the currency on the ads will be shown in U.S. dollars.
Goaling a Campaign
You determine the number of ads to deliver and amount of time in which you want to deliver them by using campaign goaling. You can goal at the campaign level or the advertising item level. When you create a new campaign goaled at the campaign level, you order the total number of requests for the whole campaign. When you schedule at the advertising item level, you set the request goals for each individual ad.
In a campaign, weight applies to ads that are goaled at the campaign level. For house ads, the weight is relative to all other house ads for all customers and all campaigns. For paid ads, the weight is relative to other paid ads in the same campaign.
You can goal the campaign by either clicks or requests. When you goal a campaign by clicks, the goals of the campaign are met when the user actually clicks the ad. When you goal the campaign by requests, the goals of the campaign are met when the ad is displayed on the specified page group.