Incorporating advertisements (ads) in your mailings is a great way to partner with another organization; whether for financial gain or partner promotion, an ad can help develop your organization's business relationships.

In addition to the ease of creating and inserting ads, the available reports will show the clicks each ad receives across multiple mailings, making it easy to report on engagement and understand how well each ad is performing.

In this article, we'll take a look at how to create and manage ads, as well as run ad reports.

Create an ad

Before you create an ad, we recommend first creating/choosing the image you're going to use. Here are a few things to consider:

View considerations

• Identify which advanced template you're going to insert your ad to (ads cannot be added to standard templates).
• Ensure your image's dimensions are appropriate for the location in your template. For example, if you're planning to display the ad in a right sidebar with a fixed width of 100 pixels, don't use an image wider than 100 pixels.
• Find out whether your image already has padding incorporated into its design or if the template's HTML needs padding added to it.
• Make sure the image file's size does NOT exceed 90KB and that its name doesn't have any spaces or special characters.
• Only use GIF, PNG, or JPG file types.
• Know what URL you want the clicked image to redirect to.
• Decide what folder you plan to store this image in.

Creating an image-based ad

1. Navigate to Mailings > Options > Advertising.
2. Click Create at the top of the page.
3. In the Add Advertising dialog:

1. Type a name for the ad
2. Select a folder to store the ad.
3. Select Image for the ad type.
4. Click Change to browse to and select the image file.
5. In the Link prompt, enter the URL to redirect to (this is where subscribers will be taken when they click the ad).
6. Enter text describing the ad (to be used in non-HTML mailings)
7. Click Save.

Creating an HTML-based Ad

1. Navigate to Mailings > Options > Advertising.
2. Click Create at the top of the page.
3. In the Add Advertising dialog:

1. Type a name for the ad
2. Select a folder to store the ad.
3. Select HTML Code for the ad type.
4. Enter the HTML Code to retrieve the displayed image from another web page (this is typically code you've received from a third-party, like the organization or vendor the ad is for OR from a designer in your organization).
5. Enter text describing the ad (to be used in non-HTML mailings)
6. Click Save.

Insert an ad to your mailing

Advertising has always been part of email marketing, and it's a great way to share information from your organization or your partner organizations. Regardless of your reason for advertising (finances or promotion), let's take a look at how to insert ads to your mailings.

There are two steps to follow when adding an advertisement:

NOTE: If you haven't already created your ad, refer to the Create an Ad section above before proceeding.

Step 1 - Add a Content Location to Your Template

When inserting an ad to your mailing, the first step is to ensure your template contains ad locations.

1. Navigate to Mailings > Templates > View and locate your desired template.
2. Hover over the ad's associated menu icon and select HTML to modify the template.
3. If your template doesn't contain any ad location codes, click the HTML Editor's Content Code icon.

4. In the resulting window, click Location Tag under the Ads heading to create a new location code. When you add an ad location, you must have a numeric value between the parentheses. Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional) uses this value to define the location itself.
5. Once you've added the location code, click Update to save your template. You'll see a preview of an advertisement location alongside a content location, like you see below:

Step 2 - Insert the ad in Your Mailing

1. Navigate to Mailings > View and locate your desired mailing.
2. Hover over the menu icon and select Edit.
3. Navigate to the mailing's Design tab. From here, you'll see an advertisement location, like you see below:

4. Click Attach Ad.
5. Select your ad from the menu.
6. Click Attach.

Create an ad image with Mail To

Instead of redirecting to a URL after an advertisement is clicked, you may want to allow an email to be sent. This involves first uploading the image to the Asset Manager, copying the path to that image, and then creating an HTML type of advertisement to use with your mailings.

Step 1 - Get the ad's image URL

The first step is to upload your advertisement image into Thrive Marketing Professional. Because you'll need the path to the image, it's best to do it using the steps below.

NOTE: This step is simply an intermediary step to accessing an image; you shouldn't save the mailing after performing this step.

1. Navigate to Mailings > View to edit any existing mailing.
2. Go to the Design tab.
3. Create or edit a story.
4. Click the Insert/Edit Image button in the editor toolbar.
5. Click the folder to the right of the Image URL field.

1. If the advertisement image you're going to use has been previously uploaded, select it and click Insert.
2. If the advertisement image is new, click Upload > Add files and select the file. Then, click Open, click Upload, and then Close. Click the Insert button on the Asset Manager dialogue box.

6. Copy the entire image path in the Image URL field.

Step Two - Create HTML ad

The second step is to create an HTML ad that references the copied URL image address you obtained in Step 1.

1. Navigate to Mailings > Options > Advertisements.
2. Click Create.
3. Name the ad and select HTML for the ad type.
4. Use the HTML below but:

1. Replace "INSERT SOURCE CODE" with the path to the image you previously copied.
2. Replace "INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS" with the email address you'd like to use.

<p><a href=mailto:INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS><img src=”INSERT SOURCE CODE” width=”IMAGE WIDTH” height=”IMAGE HEIGHT” border=”0”></a></p>

5. Create a text version.
6. Click Save.

Now, when a subscriber clicks this advertisement, they'll be able to send an email to someone at your organization.

Run ad reports

Knowing where to find these reports, and what kind of data they present, gives you the tools you need to understand how your ads are performing. If you provide advertising opportunities for other organizations, this will allow you to give them performance data as well.

To help with this, two reports are available that provide insight into this information.

Accessing ad reports

1. Navigate to Mailing > Reports > Mailing Summary Report (alternatively, navigate to Mailing > View and click the Reports button in the upper-right corner).
2. Select the appropriate filters from the left menu.
3. Click Update Results.
4. Click the View Reports tab.
5. Navigate down to the Advertisements section on the left.

Summary Report

This report looks at each advertisement and provides summarized and "mailing-by-mailing" data that correlates the clicks on each advertisement. The plus (+) icon to the left of an ad name expands to show the underlying mailings that distributed this advertisement.

The Export feature only exports the advertisement row of data. If you need mailing level data, use the Mailings with Ads report (see below).

Mailings with Ads

This report provides mailing level data. Use the column headers to sort on the data that you want to use to organize your analysis. The data can be exported to a spreadsheet for further manipulation, analysis, and reporting outside of Thrive Marketing Professional.