Creating The Text Ad

Now that you have saved the name of the campaign along with the start date, end date, number of impressions, and other options from the previous page we have to select which zones we want this ad to display in. The image below shows all the ad zones we currently have.

From this image we are going to click the box to the left of "Grinding Gears Article Tests - test text" which will actually, in my case, check both boxes on the page. We then press the "Save Changes" button. By pressing the "Save Changes" button we are telling the ad software that we want the ads in this ad campaign to run in the zones selected.

The next page that shows up will be the sub tab of "Banner overview" and on this page we want to select "Add new banner". For those of you that do not like using the mouse you will notice that the letter "n" in the word new is underlined meaning you can hold down alt and press n to actually create a new banner without having to click on the link. The page should look like the image below.

The first thing we want to do is change the "Please choose the type of banner" drop down to say "Text Ad". You will notice that the page refreshes and we now have a rather large text box that we can put our text into.

Remember this is a text ad and we cannot do html in here. Everything that we type into the text ad is going to be linked to the URL given in the box named "Destination URL (incl. http://)". This is why we cannot do google type ads as text ads but we would have to do them as html ads.

You can actually do some html in here, it is not completely off limits, just remember that everything in this text box is going to turn into a link. One example of when you would want to use html in here is if you you had a text ad and you knew people with older browsers would be using your site. If you wanted to change the color of the link or make it bold then you would just wrap the text in font or bold tags. This is obviously not the suggested way to do it because you would have to create multiple ads for the different ad spots even know the advertisers and the text ads are identical but sometimes it is required. In short you should always try to use css for styling but if you cannot then doing some formatting in here is okay.

Enter the text you want the ad to say in the text box and the destination URL in the "Destination URL" box Your page should look similar to the image below. You might also want to fill in the "Description" field which is actually a weird name because while it might be a description it is actually the name of the ad as well. If you leave the field blank then the of the ad will be "Untitled" and when looking at reports and other views it will be hard to tell ads apart.