This tutor covers the ultimate way to manage your ads and content in vldPersonals version 2.5.3 using the Ad management tools in the Control Panel (CP).

Ad blindness occurs because regular visitors see the same ads over and over and in time your ads melt into the background instead of standing out. When your ads become routine occurrences that visitors see over and over, their brain filters out routine ads and they are ignored. Not good if you rely on ads to make money from your site.

Ad blindness was first discovered by adsense users but more and more affiliate advertisers are promoting cures for ad blindness. vldPersonals commercial version provides banner/ad management in the control panel (CP), but it is limited and not very efficient. This article is to show you how to utilize vldPersonals to best manage your banners/ads and avoid ad blindness.

The answer to ad blindness is to vary your banners/ads so the visitor does not see the same ads over and over. Thanks to Ramil/Radioact, the vldCrowd owner, a minor change will help avoid some inefficiencies of vldPersonals banner management. I will discuss how to make Ramil's changes later.

First, lets look at an image of the default ad/banner management v.s. Ramil changes that will help manage your banners/ads.

In your CP, you  find the individual banners at: content/manage banners/click one of the banner groups. Note: if you did not add a banner under one of the banner groups, you will not see the individual  banner table.

If you click one of your banners, you have the option to make a banner active or inactive, however, this is very inefficient for managing ad blindness. Hence Ramil's change (see above image) was to make managing individual banners/ads more efficient by providing an easier and faster way to make your banners/ads active or inactive.

To make Ramil's  changes to manage individual banners, download the following zip folder, unzip folder and upload to your server replacing default files. Be sure to backup before replacing files.

http://www.filipina-lady.net/test253/banners_switch.zip

[size=18]How to use vldPersonals with the Above Changes to Manage Ad Blindness and Change Content[/size].

Now that we understand what ad blindness is and have Ramil's change in place, lets see how best to utilize vldPersonals ad/banner management to avoid ad blindness and change our content.

UPDATE: If you read previous articles on how to manage ads in vldPersonals, you need to be aware of a change from 2.5.2 of vldPersonals to 2.5.3.

When coding for individual ads within a banner group, the code will look like this for 2.5.3:

{banners:group="homepage",banner="side01"}

Basically the difference is, in 2.5.2 you use label= while in 2.5.3 you use banner= to display individual banners within an ad banner group.

My plan is as follows:

Since I'm concerned about ad blindness with adsense, the rest of the article will address how to manage adsense and my content with this approach. However, it will work with any type of ads, including affiliate ads. You can also include different formatting codes with your ad to change your template's format. If you are thinking initially this will take effort to setup, you are right. But once it is setup, it will be a matter of turning ads on (active) and off (inactive) to help avoid ad blindness or change conent. If you had to apply this tutor to only one area of your site, I would recommend your home page.

Here is an outline of my approach:

1. Create individual banner groups for each template - in our tutor we will be working on homepage and header templates.

2. Within each banner group, I will have different banners for that template including some format coding.

3. I will be changing content on my home page by using this method.

4. I will turn certain banners on and off by using the active/inactive switch created with Ramil's changes.

5. By varying my banners and content I hope to avoid ad blindness and attract the search engine spider more often.

The coding that I will be using in each banner in my template will be formatted like this:

{banners:group="homepage",banner="side01"} (this coding is for 2.5.3)

Lets get started. Hopefully by showing you some of the steps I will be taking, it will give you enough info to understand the best way to manage your banners/ads and content.

HOMEPAGE.TPL

By far your home page is the most important page on your site. If you applied this tutor to your homepage only, it may be enough to help double your revenue. As a benefit to managing your ads, we are going to be able to vary our content to keep the content changing for search engine spiders.

Lets look at my homepage as of this writing.

The areas I highlighted above are some of the areas I may want to consider managing for ad blindness. As you can see in the image, I have two horizontal ads at the top and one ad on the side. I also highlighted the content area for coding.

It helps to have a basic understanding of how vldPersonals templates are laid out to take advantage of ad placement.

When a visitor looks at your home page, they are actually seeing more than one template: header.tpl, footer.tpl and homepage.tpl. Any content displayed in the header.tpl or footer.tpl will be displayed on every page of your site. The header.tpl also has the coding for any sidebar content that may be displayed throughout your site. Don't make the mistake of taking the easy way out by displaying ALL your ads in the header and footer only - you will not optimize your ads if you take this route. If you want to display an ad on the side, you really only have one choice and that is to place it in the header.tpl between the sidebar coding.

The visitor sees your home page as one page and does not realize it is broken up into several templates. For managing ads, I will use the visitor's perspective of what a home page is, not the developers.

It should not be too hard to guess what I'm going to name my  banner ad group to manage my ads for my home page (remember, I'm looking at my home page through a visitor's eyes).

1. Go to CP - Content - Manage banners - Create group

I'm going to create a group called: Homepage with the label called homepage (note that the group name and label are the same name with the group name starting with a capital letter and the label name in all lower case).

2. Now within the group Homepage, I need to create my banners. I will name my banners based on their position or the type of banner being displayed on the home page. I also need to somehow group these banners within the banner group named Homepage. I will use a numbering system to do so.

For example. Within the Banner group Homepage, I will have 4 banners ending with 01. Here is the name and label of each:

Top01 - top01
Topp01 - topp01
Side01 - side01
Content01 - content01

Just like banner groups, the banner name and label name are the same with the banner name beginning with a capital letter and the label name in all lower case lettering. Notice in the above naming scheme, all names  end with the number 01. This makes it easier to know which banners should be active together. Note that in the above, Content01 is not a banner, but content only. This will help keep content changing for search engine spiders.

I will be displaying 3 ads on the home page.

Now that we have created our banners, we need to place the appropriate coding in the home page (in this case homepage.tpl and header.tpl -- again, I'm looking at the home page through the eyes of a visitor).

Summary

Lets summarize what we have done to this point using images.

Now that you see how I created and setup my banner group, plus how we displayed the banners/ads within the banner group, lets look at the banner coding within the homepage.tpl and header.tpl templates (remember, I'm looking at this through the eyes of the visitor). Note that this will not be the final coding. I'm just bringing you up to date to where we are in the tutor.

[size=18]02 Ads[/size]

Now that we have the 01 ads created under the Homepage Banner Group, we need to create alternate 02 ads under the same group. Here is how we will name and label the ads:

Top02 - top02
Side02 - side02
Content02 - content02
Right02 - right02

Just like the 01 ads, I will be displaying 3 ads on the home page. The Content02 contains content only. The difference between Content01 and 02 is they are worded and formatted differently. Giving search engines fresh content to crawl and more keywords to have my site indexed on.

In the above image, all my banners are under the Homepage Banner Group. With Ramil's change, I can now easily alternate my ads and content on my home page. Maybe for 1 week, I will have the 01 banners and content active. The following week the 02 banners and content active. I can alternate between 01 and 02 banners so members and search engines do not become blind to my home page. When time permits, I may add a 03, 04, etc to have even more versatility.

Also, vldP will monitor the clicks and CTR of each ad. This way I can test which ads do best.  In short, I can use this method to find out which ads perform best on my site. My only wish is that I could re-set the counter so all ads start out with 0 for comparison. Maybe I can do it through phpmyadmin.

Lets look at an example of some of my coding

Everything is in place. Of course we don't have to stop here. We can do the same thing for other templates, add more banners to the Homepage Banner Group I created, etc.

Lets look at two images showing the difference of my home page depending on which banners are active -- 01 or 02.

[size=24]HOMEPAGE WHEN 01 IS ACTIVE[/size]

[size=24]HOMEPAGE WHEN 02 IS ACTIVE[/size]

That's it. Sorry for the lengthy tutor. There are many ways to improve Banner management in vldP. It would be vastly improved if it mimic how adsense manages ads, but I will save that thought for another time.

Good Luck.