Customizing Bannerflow with your company’s look & feel
(By Tom on 24 February 2010 | Posted in Announcements)
This 3-minute video shows you how easy it is to customize Bannerflow.
The Bannerflow Blog. Tips, tricks, updates, ideas.
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How to upload your first ad with Bannerflow
(By Tom on 1 February 2010 | Posted in Announcements)
A quick 3-minute video showing how to set up your first Bannerflow project.
Web-based apps that we use
(By Tom on 18 January 2010 | Posted in Announcements)
Bannerflow is a web application that you can access with a web browser to manage and store your banner ad campaigns. But, clearly, we’re not alone in the web app marketplace.
We wanted to provide a quick run-down of some web apps that we use daily, some we even swear by.
- Harvest—is a great tool for managing time, invoicing and creating estimates. We’ve used a variety of resources in the past–from free-hand MS Word docs to enterprise-level billing solutions–and Harvest is a dead-simple, gorgeous application. Like many of the applications on this list, it makes a boring task not only tolerable, but actually kind of enjoyable. Extra points for integration with Basecamp, QuickBooks and other popular applications.
- Basecamp—tons is already said about 37signals’ wildly-popular application. We totally agree–it helps us stay on track.
- Notable—we use this app for managing site revisions and platform upgrades. This QA tool is fantastic. It beats the pants off trading PDFs back and forth or–even worse–trading email commentary. Check it out if you’re doing any site review work.
- iContact—not exactly a web app in the sense that there would be any other way to manage this, but we wanted to give iContact a shout-out as our email service provider of choice. Yes, of course, there more-featured, enterprise-level ESPs out there, but that’s not what we want or need. iContact follows much of the theme of this list–it’s very easy and intuitive.
What web apps do you use?
Upcoming online event: Adobe — Interactive ad campaign best practices
(By Tom on 28 July 2009 | Posted in Announcements, Banner Tips, Advertising)
A quick heads-up that Adobe will be showcasing some EyeWonder ad campaigns at an upcoming event.
On Tuesday, September 15, 2009 they’re hosting an online event titled “Stories that sell—Interactive ad campaign best practices”.
Sure to be some great examples that you can use for your ads!
Did you notice our update?
(By Tom on 5 May 2009 | Posted in Announcements)
Over the past few weeks, we’ve upgraded Bannerflow with a pretty major enhancement.
When you’re uploading an ad, you can now preview the ad right away. This change was the result of valuable feedback from many of our customers.
The new work flow works great. It was a bit of a nuisance to login-upload-logout-view; now that’s fixed.
Where else can we improve Bannerflow? Keep the feedback coming!
Learn more about Bannerflow — the best way to show banner ads to your clients.
January promotion — Get Notes for FREE
(By Tom on 12 January 2009 | Posted in Announcements)
This month we’re offering all of our customers a FREE upgrade to use our Notes feature.
With Notes, you can comment on each iterative revision and version of your ad. Never again leave your team wondering, “What’s changed between the previous version??”
Take a tour of Bannerflow to find out about all the features. Of course, we believe Bannerflow is the best way to show banner ads to your clients.
Current customers: send us a tweet @bannerflow or email us (support at bannerflow dot com) to get your upgrade.
All new customers will automatically be upgraded.
Hurry. This offer is only good in the month of January.
Happy New Year.
Solving the ‘direct (direct)’ conundrum with subdomains and Google Analytics’ Ecommerce code
(By Tom on 21 December 2008 | Posted in Announcements)
Since launching Bannerflow this fall, we’ve been using Google Analytics for tracking Bannerflow’s performance.
We ran into a problem when tracking the ecommerce aspects of the site across our subdomains — we weren’t able to accurately track the sources of our revenue. In fact, each time a transaction occurred, the source was showing as direct (direct). We knew something was up.
We examined the cookies that Google Analytics was writing to our browsers and we noticed that each time we were sent to our ecommerce subdomain — app.bannerflow.com — a new, separate cookie was being written. This was the root of what was causing our problem.
After hours and hours, we found out the solution to our problem. All we had to do was remove the period (.) that preceeded the domain name within the Google Analytics tracking code function setDomainName. So instead of “.bannerflow.com” we used just “bannerflow.com”. This differs from Google’s documentation. Here’s how our code looked once the edit was made:
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src=’" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._setDomainName("bannerflow.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
(Note: this is what worked for our particular setup, which includes an implementation of Apache and other server configurations. We’re not yet sure why the method outlined in Google’s documentation doesn’t work with our configuration, but the method outlined above does.)
Bannerflow’s MinneDemo presentation
(By Tom on 16 November 2008 | Posted in Announcements)
— HOW WE BUILT OUR DEMO —
This past Wednesday, November 12, Mike and I participated at MinneDemo.
It was a great opportunity for us to showcase Bannerflow in front of the Minneapolis tech community. We were the final presenters at the event, and we’re thankful that everyone stayed to listen with free beer a mere 25 feet away.
Here’s how we built our presentation:
— PLANNING THE DEMO —
Once we heard from Luke Francl that we were on the shortlist to present at MinneDemo, Mike and I set up an hour-long meeting to discuss what we’d say in front of 300+ people. Obviously, “Bannerflow is for showing banner ads to clients” was a good start, but we needed a little more meat.
After talking for a little bit, we wanted to make sure to define the problem that Bannerflow solves. It was important for us to specifically define why Bannerflow exists — we focused almost a third of our presentation on the HTML-FTP manual upload process that most agencies use today.
After defining the problem, planning the rest of the presentation was easy — we’d literally just show a demonstration of using Bannerflow. It is MinneDemo, after all.
With the messaging mostly complete, we hashed out an outline.
— PREPARING THE DEMO —
For our second meeting, Mike and I each talked about how we’d like to tweak the messaging. Basically, we just traded comments and revisions back-and-forth.
As we tightened the MinneDemo presentation, it became clear that we needed to prepare assets. I was responsible for creating a screencast of the manual upload process and making fake ads for the fake client, Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Mike was responsible for the more important stuff (per usual): making sure Bannerflow ran locally on his machine. We didn’t want to mess with the fickle nature of a WiFi connection.
— PRESENTING THE DEMO —
Upon arriving, we immediately found that Intermedia Arts was a wonderful venue. It allowed for a clear division between people who wanted to socialize and those who wanted to hear the demos. Both the social-zone and the theatre were packed — very cool.
During setup, we hit a few snafus getting our laptop to display on the projector, but we fixed the problem pretty quickly. Other than that, everything went pretty much to plan.
The audience laughed at our bad jokes, and we were able to get the demo done in seven minutes. Overall, a successful evening.
— AFTER MINNEDEMO —
Since MinneDemo, we’ve had record traffic to Bannerflow. And we’re receiving inquires from interested local press. We’re excited by the future of our company and we’re looking forward to what comes next!
MinneDemo follow-up
(By bannerflow on 13 November 2008 | Posted in Announcements)
Last night we had the opportunity to present Bannerflow at MinneDemo. We’ll have some more detailed comments later, but here are some quick bullet items:
- Any attendees who would like an upgrade to our Standard account, send us a message @bannerflow
- Here’s a picture of Mike presenting last night at MinneDemo
- We’ll be posting video of our demo within a few days
- We’re looking forward to more MinneDemo/MinneBar events; a lot of great people to meet and hang out with!
- Intermedia Arts was a great venue — the staff was super-helpful
- Thanks to Luke Francl and Ben Edwards for having us at the event
More soon…
Prepping for MinneDemo
(By bannerflow on 8 November 2008 | Posted in Announcements)
We’re preparing Bannerflow’s demo for MinneDemo, and really looking forward to the event.
Minnov8 posted a great podcast with Luke Francl, a MinneDemo founder, today.
Listen to the Minnov8 — MinneDemo podcast. Bannerflow is mentioned at the 30:00 mark.
Luke provided a summary of all the MinneDemo participants, and we’re really impressed with the talent demoing. (Even a bit intimidated.) Wednesday should be a lot of fun. @bannerflow us if you’re coming, or leave a comment.
— Mike & Tom