Joomla Banners: The complete guide

In Joomla you have the ability to manage your ads easily and satisfy your trusted partners without installing any third party component!

From Joomla administrative section, and in particular from the Components -> Banners option, you will view your banners, customer records, and banner categories.

From here you will need to organize your plan.

The design logic of this component is to create categories that you will pass your banners to. Just the same way that you would do with the basic article structure of the website.

You'll need to organize your banners in categories because in the module that you will show the banners the way to filter them is the category selection and / or customer selection.

Lets see the structure more detailed.

Add New Category

From Components -> Banners -> Categories you click on New button to open the create category form view.

Following the same view pattern as normal article categories, you must type the category title and if you wish you may type a category description and in general every other information you want. When you finish, you will save and exit and you will repeat the process as many times you want until you have all your necessary categories.

How you will organize your categories system it's really up to you. As an advice, we suggest you make categories of sizes. Square Ads, Wide Banner Ads etc. Or you could make categories for pages such as Front Page Ads, Footer Ads.

Add New Client

From Components - Banners - Clients you click on New button to open the create client form view.

In this form you will enter the name of the customer (you usually specify the company name), the name of the person you have as a contact, as well as their email. If you would like to see the traffic of banners that belong to a specific customer you can choose which tracking modes you will enable (Views Capture, Click Capture). Views Capture, tracks how many times the specific banner shows on screen view. Click capture tracks how many time a banner gets clicked.

When you are ready you can save and close the page and repeat the process so you get all your clients filed on Jooma.

Add New Banner

From Components - Banners - Banners you click on New button to open the new banner form view.

Except the obvious name field you can type a description title.

The form consists of three tabs. Details, Banner Details and Publishing which we will describe next.

Details Tab

Type

First of all, you must select the banner type. The types are two. Image or Custom.

If you choose image, on the next row there will be a insert image field so you can select or upload an image (png, jpg, gif etc).

if you choose custom, in the next row below you will see a text area field so you can type or copy paste the desired advertising code, for example Google AdSense, or just an html section of what you want to show.

Width and Height

If the image is larger from your available space you can force the width and height of it as it may suits you. But of course, if you are not careful, this freedom can cause aspect-ratio breaking!

Alt Text

You can type an image description

Click URL

Whatever you select you will also see that there is a Click URL field that you can type a valid URL so when your visitor clicks the Banner to trigger the action.

Description

Detailed description of you Banner

Banner Details Tab

From this tab you can type some information about the specific banner that we will analyze.

Max Impressions

You can set the maximum number of impressions (views) that the specific banner will get on your page. Every page load it is considered 1 impression. If you wish, you can leave the field empty or check the Unlimited checkbox so the banners get shown permanently.

Total Impressions and Total Clicks

Those two fields are populated by the system. The Total impression counts the banner views and the total click field counts how many times the banner got clicked.

Client

From this field you can select the desired client.

Purchase type

This field is used in conjunction with the client. Practically you check what is your deal with the client so you can later filter the clients by this.

Track Impressions and Track Clicks

Setting the tracking methods of the banner.

Publishing

Publishing tab, as the article publishing tab, has the options to control the viewing dates of the specific banner. From here you can select when the banner will get published and when it will retire.

Also you may set some keywords that you can later use on your banner modules, filtering banners per article keywords.

So here we are, having all of our ads organized and the last step is to show them to the public.

Module Publish to show Banners

Having organized all your banners, the final step is to display them to the public. To do this, you can navigate to Modules and select New.

In the module options, as shown in the image below, you will select Banners.

Create Module

In this module, you can now choose from a wide range of options for the banners you want to display at specific points on your website.

Target

In the first tab, you can define how the banners will be displayed through the target option. This gives you the choice of whether the banners when clicked will open in a new window, the same window, or in a pop-up window, etc.

Count

In the Count option, you select the number of banners that will appear on the page.

Client

Next, in the Client option, you either leave the field blank so that all banners from the banner list are filtered, or you select a specific client. If a specific client is selected, only the banners related to that client will be shown.

Keyword-Based Selection

Then, there is the option to display banners based on keywords. According to the keywords you have set for each banner, if there is a match with at least one keyword from the currently displayed article, those banners will be shown. In this way, you have a targeted method of displaying banners based on the article’s subject matter.

Random

In the Random option, you choose another way of sorting the display of banners, either by the order of sorting or randomly. Of course, in both cases, pinned banners remain at the top of the list.