Banner targeting API

Drupal has a location module that may also be used to this effect. Either banners, nodes or both can be tagged with zip codes (US and Canada only obviously) and be served up that way as well.

This sounds to me like a different approach to targeting banners is needed.

So far, the following targets have been mentioned:

• show all banners to all visitors (default)
• limit by taxonomy term
• limit by user's geographic location

Also, it might be interesting to be able to limit based on the category module and og module?

This might make the banner module way too complex, but being able to target banners more precisely is rather interesting.

You're right. That API should make it reasonably easy to implement.

How do you propose the targetting should be administered? A huge country list on the banner node edit form or fewer and bigger geographic areas (north america, south america, europe, africa, asia)? Providing a decent UI for this will take some work.

An alternative solution would be to let users filter by continent as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_continent):

+-------------------------+
| all countries (default) |
| ---                     |
| Africa                  |
| Asia                    |
| Europe                  |
| North America           |
| South America           |
| Oceania                 |
| Antarctica              |
| ---                     |
| Abkhazia                |
| Afghanistan             |
| Albania                 |
| Algeria                 |
+-------------------------+

(Although that would require some sorting of the country list when implementing it.)

I have an international site and this feature will rock. Continents are ok, but I think it's much more useful on countries. Not many advertisers focus their product on a whole continent but a set of countries.

I agree that per country would be the way to go. We were looking at locative, but the problem with that approach is many international advertisers may target multiple countries on a select buy. By continent wouldn't be how advertisers typicall do their buys.

I think UI-wise a simple approach would be the country list in a mutli-select like the on the Views | Filter. Default should be all, then selecting one or more filters to those specific countries.

This would be a tremendous addition to banner!

Targeting continents doesn't make sense to me either.
But there could definitely be additional support for targeting particular languages...
Matching banners with particular taxonomy terms of users (e.g. from the user profile or regarding CCK/nodeprofile any other vocabulary) is even more interesting.
Also think of CRE...

To cut a long story short, there are many ways to filter/target banners by audience and we rather need an ad targeting API/plugin system. Which targeting strategy is needed depends on the type of website.

Following the plugin approach, we need a special hook that is invoked in front of displaying a banner and (depending of the plugin) an additional form_alter() for the banner creation/edit form. Which plugin is activated and invoked could be defined in a separate 'banner targeting settings' page.

I'd propose to start by creating this hook system. If that was available, people could start coding new targeting plugins.

Marking as closed since the banner module has been abandoned.