Adobe Flash Professional CS3 - Manual (Page 490)

FLASH CS3
User Guide
484
• Create a GIF banner advertisement in Flash that is 12K or smaller.
• Limit looping banner advertisements to three repetitions. Many websites adopt the standardized file size recom-
mendations as advertising specifications.
• Use the GET command to pass data between an advertisement and a server, and do not use the POST command.
For more information on GET and POST, see the getURL function in ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.
Note: Provide control to the user. If you add sound to an advertisement, also add a mute button. If you create a trans-
parent Flash ad that hovers over a web page, provide a button to close the advertisement for its duration.
See also
“Optimizing graphics and animation” on page 487
Tracking advertisements
Several leading advertising networks now support standardized tracking methods in Flash SWF files. The following
guidelines describe the supported tracking methodology:
Create a button or movie clip button Use standardized dimensions outlined by the IAB. For a list of standardized
dimensions, see the IAB website. For more information on creating a button in Flash, see “Create a button” on
page 221.
Add a script to the button Executes when a user clicks the banner. You might use the getURL() function to open a
new browser window. The following code snippets are two examples of ActionScript 2.0 code you might add to
Frame 1 of the Timeline:
myButton_btn.onRelease = function(){
getURL(clickTAG, "_blank");
};
You might add the following code to Frame 1 of the Timeline:
myButton_btn.onRelease = function() {
if (clickTAG.substr(0, 5) == "http:") {
getURL(clickTAG);
}
};
The getURL() function adds the variable passed in the object and embed tags, and then sends the browser that is
launched to the specified location. The server hosting the ad can track clicks on the advertisement. For more infor-
mation on using the
getURL() function, see ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.
Assign clickTAG code for tracking Tracks the advertisement and helps the network serving the ad to track where the
ad appears and when it is clicked.
The process is the standard way of creating an advertising campaign for a typical Flash advertisement. If you assign
the
getURL() function to the banner, you can use the following process to add tracking to the banner. The following
example lets you append a variable to a URL string to pass data, which lets you set dynamic variables for each banner,
instead of creating a separate banner for each domain. You can use a single banner for the entire campaign, and any
server that is hosting the ad can track the clicks on the banner.
In the object and embed tags in your HTML, you would add code similar to the following example (where
www.helpexamples.com is the ad network, and adobe.com is the company with an advertisement):
<EMBED src="your_ad.swf?clickTAG= http://helpexamples.com/tracking?http://www.adobe.com">