Archive for February, 2009

At first, it can seem a bit confusing.

It needed to be said, and we’ve said it. There are several pieces to the puzzle that makes up the placement of an ad. Potentially more confusing, they don’t really have to be performed in the same order every time.

But let’s pretend, for an initial introduction, that you’re going to follow them from A to Z, your first time around.

The steps in placing an ad:

1. Log in to AdDogs
2. Build an ad, modify one of your prior ad designs, or upload a finished ad
3. Search our media database to find publications, placement types, and pricing
4. Choose one or more publications and placement types (add to your “media list” for later use)
5. Create an order, by matching up your ad with one or more of the publications in your media list
6. Add the order to your shopping cart, specifying publication dates and approving final ads
7. Check out, pay for the ad, and receive confirmation of your order

Read on, however – our aim is to make this potentially complicated process clear for you.

continue

Complex project? We can help.

AdDogs is staffed with advertising industry professionals who can provide you with a full range of custom services. Our expertise includes:

• Custom Advertisements and Advertising Campaigns
• Branding
• Brochure Design and Printing
• Custom Creative and Copywriting
• Direct Mail Design, Printing and Distribution
• Logo Design
• Media Planning, Buying and Contract Negotiation

If you are looking for a fast and easy way to get your projects under way please call or email us!

(832) 485-7134 -or- email Dana Kingshill

You can view short video tutorials on these topics:

• Registration as an advertiser
• Logging in and building an ad
• Selecting media for ad placement

Coming soon, additional videos, specific to the other key components of the system.

Until then, if you’ve arrived at this page and need assistance, please feel free to give us a call at:
(832) 485-7134 -or- email our support desk

AdDogs.com presently accepts payment via Amazon Payments or PayPal. Between these two options, you have the flexibility to pay via any major credit card or a direct debit from a bank account.

For those not familiar with these methods, they’re both highly reputable companies, each in its own way quite skilled in the process of handling electronic commerce. They’re not identical in form or function however.

If customers choose to use Amazon Payments, they must first have an account set up with Amazon. Many people have such accounts, as Amazon has distinguished itself over the past decade as the leading electronic merchant. They’re really quite good at handling payments, and they offer buyer protection programs which can be reviewed at their site.

PayPal is likewise a widely used service, but differs in that it’s a direct payment method: rather than charging a purchase to your PayPal account, as is the case with Amazon, you simply make a payment in which PayPal transfers money from either your PayPal account balance, your bank account, or the credit card of your choosing. All those choices are made available to you when you log in to your PayPal account. An additional and important difference is that you can make a PayPal payment without logging into your PayPal account, or without having a PayPal account at all.

Given the alternatives of Amazon and PayPal for payment processing, we at AdDogs have made the conscious decision to avoid ever being in possession of any customer’s credit card or bank account information. We don’t even want this information, let alone to store it in our system. Even though we employ standard data system protection and monitoring, we want to ensure that in the event of a breach, no sensitive information about any of our customers can be stolen from our site.

As of the data of this writing, Monster.com is in the recent news, the victim of their own massive data breach.

We don’t want to be in that position, and we don’t want to put our customers in that position.

And that’s why we choose to rely on well-known and respected companies like Amazon and PayPal to provide those services for our customers.

If you have any concerns about the payment process here at AdDogs.com, please feel free to contact us, and we’ll be happy to discuss them with you.

During ad design & creation, there are three types of information you can provide to be incorporated into the ad template you’re using, resulting in a ready-to-run ad.

If you’ve arrived here via the context-sensitive help in our application, the following information will start out as a bit duplicative. Just in case you’ve reached this page directly or via a site search, here’s a bit of background information on what you can fill out to complete a template.

On the template entry page, you may see spaces for simple text entry, more complicated “mini-word-processor” boxes, which allow font, size, style, color, and alignment fine-tuning, spaces in which to upload images, or all three.

For the simple text boxes, characterized by their bland look, simply enter the text you want to appear on the ad. After you move to another field on the screen, your ad preview picture should update automatically after a short delay.

For the image upload spaces, click the box, and you’ll be prompted for the name of the local file on your computer to be uploaded into the ad.

For the most complex template field type, the rich text editor, there are some important things to keep in mind.

First, you’ll be working in a cut-down program similar to, but in no way identical to, a standard word processor such as Wordperfect or Microsoft Word. Within it, you’ll see buttons to control text formatting in a manner similar to every word processor you’ve ever used. The specifics of how to use a word processor are of course beyond the scope of this document. If you don’t know how to use one, it’s a wonder you’ve been able to even find this page, so we’ll assume this isn’t going to be a barrier to you.

Within the rich text box (or boxes – your template may define more than one of these boxes), the bottom portion allows entry of text. In most cases, standard word processing rules about how to apply formatting are in effect. There are, however, several crucial differences.

Pressing “Enter” at the end of a line will create a new paragraph, separated from the prior paragraph by a prominent blank line. If what you want is simply to proceed to the next line without starting a new paragraph, you’ll need to execute a “half line break”, which is performed by holding the shift key as you press “Enter”.

It’s quite common to find that the text for an ad is being copied out of another program which itself handles rich text natively. Examples of this include Microsoft Word, some versions of Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, and potentially thousands of other possibilities. When copying text from programs like that, you’ll want to be very careful to ensure that you don’t become ensnared by the formatting gunk that those (and all such) programs embed, hidden in their text.

On this page, you may see spaces for simple text entry, more complicated “mini-word-processor” boxes, which allow font, size, style, color, and alignment fine-tuning, spaces in which to upload images, or all three.

For the simple text boxes, characterized by their bland look, simply enter the text you want to appear on the ad. After you move to another field on the screen, your ad preview picture should update automatically after a short delay.

For the image upload spaces, click the box, and you’ll be prompted for the name of the local file on your button labeled “Paste from Word”. It’s the picture of a clipboard with a small blue “W” on it, like so:  

When you click that icon, a window will open, into which you paste via whatever method you normally do such things. You’ll then click the “Insert” button, and the text will be sanitized as best it can be, before being pasted into our rich text control.

Important Note: “as best it can be”, referenced above, means what it says. We have no control over the quality of the formatting of text in other programs outside of AdDogs, and in some cases, Microsoft Word or other similar applications will create utterly convoluted formatting, based on how that document was manipulated in its lifetime before you’ve tried to use it in creating an ad.

When this happens, you’ve got several choices.

First, you can highlight all the text in your ad, then click the “Remove Formatting” button at the top of the rich text control. It’s a picture of something which could, I suppose, be an eraser.

Second, if that doesn’t work, please consider the trade-off in real world terms between your fussing and fiddling with our rich text box and simply clearing the text and typing it from scratch, sans any of the garbage your other application might have added to the mix. No offense to your other application, but if it involves wasting time, unless your ad is longer than War and Peace, you’re really better off typing the text and moving on with your life. In our experience, 95% of the time, “Paste from Word” does its job perfectly well, and no hand typing is necessary in cases where the original ad copy is available in Microsoft Word.

It’s also been our experience, just so you know, that 78% of all statistics quoted on web sites are completely made up, so your mileage may vary.

As you make changes in the rich text box (or boxes), you can click the “Save” button, characterized as a small diskette at the top of the text area. If you don’t execute a Save, your ad copy will not be lost, but will not be dynamically updated in the preview picture of the ad. Should you proceed through all your text entry and move on to previewing the ad, giving it a name, and viewing a PDF version of the ad, don’t worry – your copy will be automatically saved before the system proceeds to the review step.

The preview picture may contain a watermark - that watermark will of course not be present in your final ad image.