clickTAG or clickTag? That is the question
by matt @ 8:02 pm. Blogged under Web Technology, Banner Advertising, Rich Media
I often blog something which I know will go over the heads of those who aren’t familiar with online advertising. However, I know that when I can’t easily find the answer to a question I have, it helps a lot of people out there when I blog the answer. So, if you don’t know what a clickTag is, then look away now. If on the other hand you, like me, are trying to get to the bottom of whether the clicktag instruction on Flash banners should be clickTAG, clickTag or clicktag then join the club and read on.
A ClickTag is a bit of code embedded in Flash creative. It allows ad serving applications such as Dart for Publishers to dynamically assign a click through URL, which tells the browser to send the user to the proper landing page when the user clicks on the advert. It means the application that serves the Flash file can determine the URL, rather than it being hardcoded into the Flash file itself, which in turn means user clicks can be counted.
Older versions of Flash (Flash 6 or lower) read clicktag the same way as CLICKTAG and ClickTag. They did not distinguish between upper and lower case letters. Newer versions of Flash ( Flash 7 or 8 ) are case sensitive. If there is any variation between the case expected in the ad serving template and the case used in the Flash code, the .SWF file will not click through properly.
The majority of online media packs state clickTag (upper case ‘T’ only). On consultation of the Macromedia website (now Adobe) we are told to use clickTAG (upper case). With designers creating ads for display on a number of ad servers this causes much confusion with materials received by ad traffickers. I think it’s fairly safe to say that clickTAG should be the definitive tag as advised by Adobe, but how do you know what you’ve been supplied with by an advertiser / designer?
Since it is much easier to alter the case of the letters in the ad server than it is to recode the Flash file, it is recommended that you see how the clickTAG is coded in the creative and change the case in the ad server to match.
How to check clickTAG case:
1. Download an Action Script Viewer
2. Drag and drop a .SWF creative file into the application.
3. Look for the clickTAG details in the timeline area (select actions one by one to find the clickTAG).
If the case used is different to that in your ad server (and media specifications), change the case of the clickTAG in the ad server template to match what has been used for a quick fix. Then be sure to tell the naughty designer not to do it again.
Technorati Tags: clicktags, flash banners, action script
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October 11th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
I’ve spent the entire morning debating with traffickers over this.
Great post, let’s hope the right people read it.
May 9th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Was talking about this recently at a conference, where someone made the audacious claim that they invented the clickTAG. “Great”, I said, “but you f***ed up the documentation - is it clickTag or clickTAG?”…
You can check it by uploading the file somewhere and append a query string to the end -
?clickTAG=http://www.bbc.co.uk
If that doesn’t work, then
?clickTag=http://www.bbc.co.uk
May 9th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
The best tool I found over the past six months for ad traffickers to check this (and other things like the Flash version used at export) is the SoThink Flash Decompiler which not only shows the actionscript for ClickTAGs but enables ‘Flash grabbing’ from page embedded files. SoThink is especially useful for files containing multiple clickTAGs like clickTAG, clickTAG2, clickTAG3 etc.
October 11th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Check out my website, you will find the first and only online clickTag checker : http://www.adopstools.net/
along with a lot of infos for ad operations
October 11th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Thanks Sam, a very handy tool indeed and one which saves Ad Ops people having to download SoThink!
October 18th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Simple thing to adopt for designers is to do a catch all tag, something along the lines of….
on(release) {
if(clickTAG==undefined) {
getURL(_level0.clickTag,”_blank”);
} else {
getURL(_level0.clickTAG,”_blank”);
}
}
October 19th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Thanks Alan, has this been tested with ad servers like Dart? I think one of the main problems is that the templates DFP produce with WYSIWIG entry forms rely upon a particular format of clickTAG (usually clickTag) - and aren’t easily changed without quite a bit of manual fiddling.
October 30th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
I’m not entirely sure what other ad serving companies are adopting.
I work for Eye-D at the moment on their hosting and ad serving system which is entirely independent of Dart/Motif etc… and have been trying to push this simple bit of code to make it less hassle for designers in the future with having flash files sent back etc…
Another thing I guess could be implemented at the ad serving end, is to push in 2 variables in the format like above to the swf’s when being served… but for the sake of having to var’s possibly clash in different language versions because of uppercase/lowercase it’s not something I’d been keen to do.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I’m a huge Sothink fan as well, all my team have it, along with ActionScript Viewer and ActionScript Editor which has proved invaluable recently. Sam’s tool (www.adopstools.net) is truely unique though for being web-based and open to all, I’d like to thank him for making it publically available.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Because we receive more and more requests for troubleshooting on this exact issue lately, we have implemented a check within our ad serving system to see which parameter (clickTAG, clickTag, ClickTag, etc) should be passed to the SWF file.
This should make life a little easier for the ad traffickers/designers given many different ad servers out there.