Managing your advertising in seems a straightforward affair. You pick the advertiser you want, you pick the banner you want and then plug the code given to you back into your website to display that ad.

But if you are a bit more advanced and want rotating advertising, banners, skyscrapers, 120×60 buttons and so on, you have probably tinkered with SmartZones. I have written about how to create , how to add more banners to them, but now I want to show you how to weight your ads in each SmartZone.

Say you have four ads in a single SmartZone. For every one hundred impressions that SmartZone receives, those ads will each receive 25 impressions. That is to say that when created they are all given equal weight (importance) in the SmartZone.

So starting with the SmartZone page, like this:
smartzone1.gif

Click on the View link to open up a SmartZone, like this…
smartzone2.gif

…you will see the current ads you have in there, and on the right side is a column called Traffic Allocation. Each one of your ads will have the Weight set to 1 (default), like this on the right side (you can see it just at the bottom):
smartzone3.gif

From Commission Junction’s own help pages, Traffic Allocation (weight) is defined as:

Enables you to specify a weight for each link in the SmartZone. The weights range from 0 to 10, often in increments. The weight determines how often that link displays in the SmartZone’s ad rotation, relative to the other link weights.

So if you leave three of the ads at 1, and put the other at 10, the ad you have with a weight value of 10 will appear far more often than the other three. This is not to say exclusively though, the other ads will still show - unless you set their weights to 0.