Shoutbox Banners

What is a Shoutbox?

Shoutboxes are banners that are displayed in a floating layer that adheres itself to bottom right or left corner of the browser window. The major draw is that as a visitor scrolls down your page the shoutbox stays put. This simple technique inherently optimizes viewable impressions because the shoutbox is always above the fold!

Live Example

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I'll do you one better with a live example.

Mobile Friendly

Hopefully you took note of the wealth of information on the live example page. In case you missed it though, shoutboxes are mobile friendly! You are able to serve up a 300x250 banner to desktop/laptop and tablet users while serving a smaller 180x150 banner to mobile phone users with ease. This is, in fact, a highly effective way to deploy banner ads on the mobile version of your web site.

Creating a Shoutbox

Already know how to create a graphic banner, Flash banner or third-party banner with AdvertServe? Then you already know how to create a shoutbox. Seriously, I'm not kidding. You can turn any plain old banner zone into a shoutbox just by checking an option in the Code Wizard!

1. Go to Media and create a new media. It can be a graphic banner, Flash banner or even a HTML banner if you need to use third-party tags. We suggest 300x250 for the size, but any square or rectangular size will work well.
2. You'll obviously want to set up a zone with multiple campaigns/media on your live web site, but for the purpose of this example we'll skip those extra steps.
3. Go to the Code Wizard
   • Select your Media and optionally a Publisher if that's applicable.
   • Check the Effects option and select Shoutbox as the desired effect.
   • You can also choose if you want the shoutbox to have a close button.
   • The alignment of the shoutbox banner can be changed to right or left.
   • Press the Generate Code button

Once you have the generated code, simply copy and paste it into the bottom of your web page near the </body> tag.

Final Thoughts

One last thing, which should be fairly obvious but it's important to point out that shoutboxes can be added to any web site without having to make any changes to the layout of your web site content. This is huge. Adding new banner positions within your page content can sometimes mean totally reworking how your content is arranged. The shoutbox just drops right in there and starts earning money, so the only question is why aren't you running one yet?