Advert Pro?

[regier]

I was wondering if anyone here uses advert pro as their banner advertising program. I am looking at buying it, and was wondering if anyone has any feedback about it.

[jerryp]

I started using it a month or so ago and so far it's been working fine. There's a minor bug that they are aware of but don't have a fix for that's causing me fits right now, but I understand they are working on it. I chose their program over a bunch of others and I guess I'd say I'm happy with it.

[regier]

Thanks for the feedback. What exactly was the glitch with it?

[jerryp]

The glitch is in adding new accounts. Basically, you need to set up / add the new account the day before you run the campaign because the weightings get messed up if you start the campaign on the same day you add the account. My situation is a little worse, but we haven't quite figured out why yet.

[regier]

That is odd. I guess it is possible to work around though. Does it happen when you add banners to an existing region, or is it just if you add a new account.

[jerryp]

I think it's only when I add new accounts, I haven't tried adding a banner to an existing account yet, because it would make those stats available to the other advertiser.

I think I understand why it happens... They are trying to balance the displays and so I'm guessing the program looks to see if matches the weights for each account displayed so far today, and because the new banner doesn't have any displays, it keeps showing that banner until it catches up with the others.

[regier]

That makes sense.

I don't have a lot of advertisers, so that probably isn't going to be a problem with me. How many impressions a day are you running through it, and does it seem to bog down your server a lot?

[jerryp]

I'm sure they'll eventually get it worked out, but right now I have two accounts I have to add in so I have one of my contract programmers looking at it... Oh well.

I think I do something like 30k a day and it's put a bit more of a load on the server than my old banner program, which was written in C instead of perl... Right now I can't use mod_perl or fast cgi so I'm suffering a little because of that. I understand those versions perform a fair bit better.

[regier]

Thanks for your help. I think I will give it a shot.