Help

http://www.crankyads.com/manager/

Login into your CrankyAds Manager Account and you will find it under “Your Account”

No, if you can follow basic instructions, you can easily use CrankyAds. You will need to have a paypal account, if you have not got one you can register for a paypal account

The full terms of service, including privacy policy can be found here in the Terms and Conditions

Publisher is the website owner offering advertising opportunities on their site. Advertiser is the person/business promoting product(s) on the Publisher’s site.

Every kind you can think of from your header banner to sidebar widget, including rotating ads. Create the style of ad you wish to have within the “Create New Zone.” This means you can have multiple styles of ad campaigns, running at the same time.

The Publisher sets the price. This could be from 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, there are numerous options offered when you set up your CrankyAds zone. The Publisher even has the option of allowing price offers.

By credit card or paypal

Yes. Publishers and Advertisers can create as many profiles and campaigns, using the Cranky Ads Management Account.

We make money when we bring additional revenue to the Publisher, through the Marketplace. The Marketplace is CrankyAds store listing of Publisher’s campaign opportunities. If an Advertiser purchases a campaign through the Marketplace, CrankyAds takes a part of the fees.

Yes, you can have a look at our Terms of Service here: http://www.crankyads.com/terms-and-conditions/

After downloading and installing CrankyAds on your website, it automatically creates an advertise page, listing all advertising opportunities on your site. Once you have created and place your crankyads widgets on your site, ‘advertise here’ button/banner will show.

Upon clicking on ‘advertise here’ widget, it will flick to the ‘Advertise’ page, allowing the advertiser to login, upload ad image, provide webpage link and make payment.

Once this has been processed it is up to the Publisher to approve the campaign within their CrankyAds Manager Account.

As many as you want. When creating your zones you will find [?] which offers helpful advice and recommendations when setting up your zones.

Yes, you can find the guide at Getting Started

Social proof. If you had several ‘advertise here’ boxes/banners showing, it clearly means no one wants to sponsor your site.

You can monitor them all through your CrankyAds Manager Account, here you will see pending approval and active campaigns.

You will also be able to see the statistics of individual ads (ie. page impressions, clicks etc.) this is the same for both the Publisher and the Advertiser.

The Publisher decides and approves which ads are going to be featured on their site.

Yes. Publishers and Advertisers can create as many profiles and campaigns, using the Cranky Ads Management Account.

Yes you will receive an email each and every time the status of your ad changes. You can also check the status of your ads from the CrankyAds manager here ( http://www.crankyads.com/Manager/MyAds/Pending )

The past 3 months of impressions are added up, then divided into a daily average, which is then multiplied by 30 to get the average monthly impression. If it is less than 3 months of data, it will add up the impressions it has, divided by a daily average, multiplied by 30 to get the monthly impressions.

Every time an ad image is loaded, one view is logged for that ad, those views are then used to calculate the average monthly impressions.

Every time a campaign is clicked, the user passes through the cranky ads server which records one click for that ad and also a click for that campaign’s zone.

To get the average CTR the views from the last 3 months are added up and averaged into a daily click count, then the system does average daily clicks/views to get the average CTR.

Sometimes analytics or other trackers may average the clicks and views over different lengths of time to produce different averages. For example, if an ad image does not load (ie. the browser is closed before image is fully loaded or if it is broken) crankyads will not track it as a view, whereas other analytics tool may still log a page view for that user, therefore producing a different result.

The average views per month on your advertise here page will be the average views per month that each advertiser can expect to get when purchasing a zone.

For example, if your zone gets 10,000 views per month but you accept 2 advertisers and only display 1 ad at a time then the “views per month” for your zone will be 5,000.

The calculation for views per month for the zone is pretty simple, we simply average of the actual views we’ve recorded over the month.

For example, if you get 10 views per day over 7 days we extrapolate that to 300 views per month. Likewise if you’ve had 10 views over 29 days and 1000 views on day 30 then your average views per month will be 1290 (29 * 10 + 1 * 1000).

If you look at your Campaigns in the Manager you can click the “More Info” box and you’ll see the Views and Clicks for that campaign.

This is done by design. If you have 6 campaigns all showing “Advertise Here” banners it acts as negative social proof for advertisers coming to your site (no one wants to be the first to take the plunge).

What you can do however is find a number of affiliate links and upload those as your own internal ads. This also has the benefit of making your site looks like advertisers have already come and purchased ads, which helps as positive social proof. As more advertisers buy ads you can slowly cancel your internal campaigns to make more room.

If you delete your Advertise Here page you will need to instruct CrankyAds to use another “Advertise Here” page. You can also instruct CrankyAds to use another page without deleting the auto created Advertise Here page. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to your WordPress admin pages and click on the CrankyAds tab down the left
2. On the CrankyAds settings page you’ll see 3 tabs, click on the ‘Edit Plugin Options’ tab
3. Click on the ‘Advanced Options’ link to open the advanced options. Now type in your Advertise Here Page ID into the ‘Advertise Here Page Id’ field
4. Click ‘Save Changes’

To find the ID of your custom Advertise Here page do the following:

1. In your WordPress Admin panel click on the Pages tab.
2. Hover over your Advertise Here page and select edit
3. You should now be editing your advertise here page. Look at the URL and you should see something like this:

   http://www.site.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=68&action=edit

   Your page ID is the number next to post, in this case the page id is 68

4. Finally, when you put the contents on that page make sure to include the following text so that CrankyAds can automatically display your zones and hook them up to your PayPal account:

   [CrankyAdsAdvertiseHere]

Yes the image needs to be the correct size for your zone. So if your zone is a 125×125 image zone then you’ll need to upload your Advertise Here image as a 125×125 image.

Were you thinking of using CrankyAds as a type of job board? If so then unfortunately this isn’t what CrankyAds is designed to do. CrankyAds is designed purely to let you add Banner/Video/TextLink ads and let advertisers buy those automatically.

If you’d like to display zones only on specific pages you could either do that through your theme (assuming your theme supports this feature) or you could download the Widget Logic plugin and then limit the CrankyAds Zone Widgets to certain pages only:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-logic-visual/

entrepreneurs-journey.com uses its own styles to display CrankyAds, however, we’re going to integrate them into CrankyAds directly in the near future.

For the moment if you want the Advertise Here blending effects you can do the following:

Go to Appearance > Edit > Stylesheet (style.css). Then Add the following lines to the very bottom of the file and hit Update File:

.cranky-ads-zone-ad-advertise-here { background: #333 !important; text-decoration: none !important; -webkit-transition: background 0.5s linear; -moz-transition: background 0.5s linear; -o-transition: background 0.5s linear; transition: background 0.5s linear; } .cranky-ads-zone-ad-advertise-here:hover { background: #555 !important; text-decoration: none !important; -webkit-transition: background 0.5s linear; -moz-transition: background 0.5s linear; -o-transition: background 0.5s linear; transition: background 0.5s linear; }

To get the ADs displaying per post you will need to edit your theme’s code. Go to wp-admin > Appearances > Editor.

Then find either loop-single.php (or single.php if loop-single.php doesn’t exist).

Then add the following line just before the call to comments_template(..) (or endwhile if comments_template() doesn’t exist).

< ?php if(function_exists(“CrankyAdsZone”)) { CrankyAdsZone(ZONEID); } ?>

Where ZONEID is the id of the zone, which you can find by clicking on the MANUAL button on your Active Zones tab in the CrankyAds settings page.

Of course try this out on a test site first in case you make a mistake and make sure you back-up your system before you edit your theme templates.

I haven’t checked but there might also be a plugin that lets you display widgets within a post. In that case you should be able to drag an Ad widget into that slot, and this might be the better solution if you’re not comfortable editing code.

Regarding the Ad styles, we’re working on the next upgrade to the plugin which will make it a lot easier to style ads for your site. But for now you can add the following styles to your style.css file:

.cranky-ads-textlink-ad { font: 13px Verdana, sans-serif !important; text-decoration: underline !important; } .cranky-ads-textlink-ad:hover { text-decoration: none !important; }

If you add the following to your style.css file the spaces will disappear: .cranky-ads-zone-1157 a { margin: 0px !important; }

Try adding this to your style.css file:

.cranky-ads-zone .cranky-ads-zone-background { padding-left:0px !important; padding-right:0px !important; }

.cranky-ads-zone .cranky-ads-zone-ad { margin-left:0px !important; margin-right:0px !important; }

Just add the following lines to your style.css and everything should be fixed:

.cranky-ads-zone-576 .cranky-ads-zone-background { padding-left:0px !important; padding-right:0px !important; }

.cranky-ads-zone-576 .cranky-ads-zone-ad { margin-left:0px !important; margin-right:0px !important; }

It looks like you’re overriding the margins at the bottom of your style.css file:

div.cranky-ads-zone-background a.cranky-ads-zone-ad{margin:0px !important;margin-left:0px !important;margin-right:0px !important;margin-bottom:0px !important;margin-top:0px !important;}

If you want to keep this entry in there AND get the 125×125 ad zone to display normally just add the following to the very end of your style.css:

div.cranky-ads-zone-573 div.cranky-ads-zone-background a.cranky-ads-zone-ad{margin:5px !important;}

I will stress that we’re working on integrating a proper way of handling styles so this should be as simple as editing the CrankyAds.css file in a future release.

I’ve added a class to that div “cranky-ads-zone-separator”. If you add the following line to your style.css you’ll be able to hide that DIV yourself:

.cranky-ads-zone-separator { display:none !important; }

We are working on is an update to the plugin which will get rid of the inline styles and let you edit the ad .css file directly. That’ll give you a bit more control of how your ads are displayed without having to write the whole CSS from scratch. Keep a lookout for it in our blog in the next few weeks.

I uploaded two affiliate campaigns. Now I have the two campaigns on the first row and the “advertise here” banner on the second row. How can I put the “Advertise Here” banner in first place?

you can “simulate” it by adding the following CSS to your style.css file

.cranky-ads-zone-ad-advertise-here span { color: transparent; font-size: 1px; } .cranky-ads-zone-ad-advertise-here span:before { content: ‘Anuncie aqui’; display: inline; color: white; font-size: 24px;}

You might have to play with the font size in the second rule depending on your ad zone size.Regarding the Advertise Here banner position, this should change every page refresh which should make it more noticeable to your visitors / potential advertisers.

This will be a little easier in future but for now you can update your styles by going to Appearance > Edit > Stylesheet (style.css). Then Add the following lines to the very bottom of the file and hit Update File

.cranky-ads-zone { text-align:center !important; } .cranky-ads-zone .cranky-ads-zone-background { float: none !important; display: inline-block; }

We’re going to make this a lot easier to edit in future, but for the moment you can add the following lines to your style.css file. Just go to Appearance > Edit > Stylesheet (style.css). Then Add the following lines to the very bottom of the file and hit Update File

div.cranky-ads-zone-background { padding:0px !important; padding-left:0px !important; padding-right:0px !important; padding-bottom:0px !important; padding-top:0px !important; }

div.cranky-ads-zone-background a.cranky-ads-zone-ad { margin:0px !important; margin-left:0px !important; margin-right:0px !important; margin-bottom:0px !important; margin-top:0px !important; }

We’re planning to make it a lot easier to edit your styles in a future release, but for now you can overwrite the inline styles by placing !important after your own CSS styles.

If you want to change the Advertise-Here styles then you can do the following:

Go to Appearance > Edit > Stylesheet (style.css). Then Add the following lines to the very bottom of the file and hit Update File:

.cranky-ads-zone-ad-advertise-here { color: #FFF !important; background-color: #333 !important; }

Obviously substitute the colours you want. Also, if you want a fading Advertise-Here block you can use the following

.cranky-ads-zone-ad-advertise-here { color: #FFF !important; background: #333 !important; text-decoration: none !important; -webkit-transition: background 0.5s linear; -moz-transition: background 0.5s linear; -o-transition: background 0.5s linear; transition: background 0.5s linear; } .cranky-ads-zone-ad-advertise-here:hover { color: #FFF !important; background: #555 !important; text-decoration: none !important; -webkit-transition: background 0.5s linear; -moz-transition: background 0.5s linear; -o-transition: background 0.5s linear; transition: background 0.5s linear; }

The ad cache on your site updates every 15 minutes so you might have to wait a few minutes before the new changes take effect.

This was done by design because if your ads stay in the same spot then visitors to your site tend to get blind to them and ignore them. The same goes for your own Advertise Here spot.

The Advertise Here banner (and all banners) are designed to rotate into different positions so people don’t become used to seeing the same banners in the same place. This helps your banners get clicked more often, including the advertise here banner.

Yes, you can edit the Advertise Here page once it’s created. This is what Yaro did on his Advertise Here page: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/advertise/

It takes about 1 week for the plugin to collect impression stats for each of your zones. After that the information will appear on your Advertise Here page as well.

This is a common problem with YouTube/Flash videos which we can’t automatically fix from within CrankyAds. But if you append “?wmode=opaque” to the end of your YouTube url (so that it becomes http://www.youtube.com/embed/D70hcK81oHQ?wmode=opaque ) it will get rid of the problem.

If you go to the CrankyAds settings page > Edit Plugin Options > Advanced Options, you’ll notice you can set the Advertise Here Page Id. Set that to any page you want, but remember to include the [CrankyAdsAdvertiseHere] shortcode in your target page’s content somewhere.

Unfortunately since the content is dynamic it comes directly off our server.

Unfortunately, since CrankyAds is run directly from your blog you can’t just insert HTML/JS code (which typically goes off to load ads from the advertiser’s website).

CrankyAds only runs on WordPress for the moment. We want to get it working perfectly before we move on the other platforms. Once we get this right we’ll look at supporting non-Wordpress websites in a similar way.

We don’t currently have a JavaScript version that you can put into these zones (but it is coming in the next few months according to our current schedule). You could try inserting the PHP code into that space, we’ve had success with a few some themes executing php in these blocks.

Yes, right now it’s a payment based on time duration, there are no CPM or similar action based systems, just a simple one time payment for a certain time period. This MAY change in the future, but not likely this year.

Yes that’s not a problem. CrankyAds is a tool that let’s you manage your ads, you can choose when and how to use it.

CrankyAds performs some caching and (depending on whether you also have another page caching plugin running) you’ll might need to wait a few minutes for the zones to update. Often with caching you will see the same banner. Try it with a different browser or a different computer or your mobile phone and see what ads appear. It should always rotate evenly including an advertise here ad (unless you are sold out of spaces of course).

Yes you can add affiliate ads by logging into your crankyads manager account, clicking the website you want to add the campaign to then click the “upload campaign” tab to add the internal campaign (affiliate ad).

The only possibly difficulty is the type of link you get from the affiliate program. The closer it is to a normal hyperlink the more likely it will work fine.

You can upgrade manually by doing the following:

1. Go to your WordPress Admin Panel > CrankyAds tab > Plugin Options
2. Record your: Site Name, Site Description, PayPal Email, Category and (if you’ve changed it) your Advertise Here Page Id

1. Go to your WordPress Admin Panel > Plugins tab
2. Deactivate CrankyAds
3. Delete CrankyAds
4. Download the new version from http://www.crankyads.com/download
5. Go to WordPress Admin Panel > Plugins > Add New
6. Upload the new CrankyAds.zip file
7. Activate CrankyAds
8. Click on the WordPress Admin Panel > CrankyAds tab
9. Click login to existing account (using the same details as you recorded in steps A and B)
10. If you want to restore your old Advertise Here page then go to WordPress Admin Panel > CrankyAds tab > Edit Plugin Options and type in your old advertise here page ID (also take note of the new advertise here page id in case you want to delete it).
11. Then go to WordPress Admin Panel > Pages and ensure that your old Advertise Here page is set to published and that the newly created Advertise Here page is set to Draft or deleted.

This URL just needs to be the URL shown in your browser when you hit the Advertise Here page. For example, the URL for Entrepreneur’s Journey would be http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/advertise/

This is most likely caused by a setting in your WordPress or Server configuration.

These type of ad plugins are designed to serve HTML/Javascript code directly to your user (which then goes off to load ads from the ad provider’s server later). However, the CrankyAds plugin serves ads directly from your site by calling a PHP function. If you put the CrankyAds PHP code into Advertising Manager, the code will not run since the plugin expects plain HTML to serve directly to the user.

If you want to display ads on your site you need to either use the Widgets (labelled Ad: YOUR_ZONE_NAME) or place the PHP code into your theme directly.

For example, if you wanted to place an ad image at the bottom of each post, but before the comments, you could do the following:

Go to Appearance > Edit > Single Post (single.php), then add your CrankyAds code just before the comment line and hit Update File. The result should look something like this:

…

< ? php get_template_part( ‘content’, ‘single’ ); ? > < ? php if(function_exists(‘CrankyAdsZone’)) { CrankyAdsZone(1); } ? >

< ? php comments_template( ”, true ); ? >

< ? php endwhile; // end of the loop. ? > …

Future Feature – we have received a few requests to make it easier to display CrankyAds throughout your site, so we’ll be looking to ad features similar to Advertising Manager directly into CrankyAds.

CrankyAds doesn’t load everything when your page loads the first time (so that CrankyAds keeps your site running fast). If your site uses a page caching plugin this means that your advertise here page is cached WITHOUT all the content and none of the content will show up until your plugin refreshes the page.

At the moment we are working in a paid option to have the powered by removed from the plugin due to feedback requests like yours.

At the moment you can’t use CrankyAds as the method to implement Google AdWords because the system only accepts banners, text links and video ad formats.

However due to feedback like yours we are considering having an option to switch on adwords as a placeholder ad until you sell ads directly to sponsors. It’s on our to talk about list at CrankyAds HQ.

The affiliate link is the URL you want the banner to point to.

Upload your banner, enter the affiliate link into the URL field, and then that banner will click through to your affiliate link.

.gif images are fine to use.

Unfortunately there’s no way of changing “Advertise Here” to “Your Link Here” just yet.

For cancelling campaigns: they should disappear within an hour at most as we have some sophisticated caching running on crankyads to make sure it does not crash any websites. Because of this changes you make should take up to 15 minutes to appear, but it could be longer. The cancelled campaigns should go into the cancelled section of the manager, not the active.

There are no PageRank limits to installing the plugin.

I’ve seen this error a number of times when testing compatibility issues between CrankyAds and other plugins. This is usually caused by other “out of date” plugins interfering with CrankyAds, so you try upgrading any plugins that are out of date before trying CrankyAds again.

At the moment that’s the case but we’ve scheduled a task for August 2012 to remove this requirement so all the advertisers need to do is supply an email address (so you can contact them if you need to).

Once we’ve made the change the update will happen automatically with no plugin update required.

PayPal Premiere or Business account

One-time payment option

I suggest in this situation you give them a reduced time period. Run the add for two weeks instead of a month if they want half the impressions for example. Ideally though I’d suggest splitting up the zone with multiple campaigns, even if that means some advertisers get more impressions initially when no other ads are in place (nothing wrong with overdelivering!).

In this case only new advertisers will be charged the $75 per month but all existing advertisers will still be on $50 per month. This is because PayPal will not allow the payment details of a subscription to change.

If you want existing advertisers to upgrade to the new $75 per month price you could either:

1. Ask them to repurchase the ad at the new price and then cancel their old Ad and PayPal subscription. or

2. Ask them to sign up to a new PayPal subscription that you setup manually and then cancel their existing PayPal subscription.

At some stage in the future however this will be a little more integrated with CrankyAds so you don’t have to manage the payments separately.

Buysellads and Puxee take 25% of any ad sales you make, even off your own site. We don’t take anything from sales you make off your own site.

[http://www.crankyads.com/advice/i-am-not-making-money-what-should-i-do]

At the moment coupon discount codes are a feature we are working on in a future release, so for now if you want to do a discount you have a few options.

1. Drop the price and tell the advertiser to go to your advertise here page and buy, then raise it up after that.

2. Create your own paypal link and tell them to pay through that, then submit their media through crankyads but skip the payment part at the end (you then approve their ad) – this also works for doing a free trial as in Paypal you can create a subscription link that charges nothing for the first month, then kicks in a regular fee in the second month.

3. Ask them to order via the usual means with crankyads and then refund some or all of their first payment in paypal.

Personally if it was me I would do option 2 at this stage as it is easy to create a link in paypal specifically for that advertiser – you can even name the link after them “Acme 1 Month Discount” for example.

At the moment the manager is only in English. That’s actually because it takes quite a bit of development to support multiple languages (since every piece of text in multiple file types needs to be gathered and translated).

At present the only solution I could suggest is asking advertisers use Google Translate when logged into the back end. It’s not an ideal solution but when using Google Chrome it pops up automatically when a website isn’t in your local language which has helped me out a few time on non-english sites.

We’re planning to release an affiliate program in the near future, but at the moment we’re still focussing mostly on developing features and optimising performance. We want to make sure our core features are all there, working correctly and running as fast as possible before we focus on marketing.

I’ve just added “Self Help” to the category list. You can change your blog category in the CrankyAds Settings > Edit Plugin Options tab.

At the moment we have that feature listed on our to-do list, so for now you will have to use our Advertise Here banners, or you can upload your own campaign in the crankyads manager for that site and have the link point to your advertise here page. Sort of like an internal campaign for your own advertising page.

Using this technique you’ll still see the CrankyAds “Advertise Here” box but you’ll also see your own “Advertise Here Internal Ad” rotated.

To upload an Internal Advertise Here Ad:

1. Log into your manager account here (http://www.crankyads.com/Manager ) 2. Select “My Sites” then your site 3. Select the “Upload Campaign” tab 4. Click on the zone that you want to upload the “Advertise Here” image for 5. Upload the Advertise Here image and set the URL to the URL of your Advertise Here page 6. Press Save

The cache on your site will take 15-30 minutes to update but after that your “Advertise Here” banner will rotate with the default CrankyAds Advertise Here banner.

Minimum requirements to appear on the marketplace

There are a few minimum requirements to appear on the marketplace since advertisers come to the marketplace to buy ads. These might change in time but for the moment the minimum requirements are:

1. Must not be a local test site (i.e. localhost or 127.0.0.1) 2. Must have had CrankyAds active for more than 1 week 3. Must have displayed a zone every day for more than 1 week (whether you’re running ads or not) 4. Must have a minimum of 500 impressions per month for pages running ads.

If your site meets those requirements then you should see it up on the marketplace soon. If you don’t but you think it should be on the marketplace then let me know.

CrankyAds works only on a site by site basis at the moment

The marketplace has not launched because we are still working on it at the moment.

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