I have always wondered how I can save a flash banner from an advertiser to show to a client for later use on my computer and did a little poking around and found out how to do it using Firefox.
Once you see a flash banner or button that you want to save to your desktop locally then all you need to do is follow the steps below and make sure you are using Firefox as your browser:
1. Right click on a blank space in the page where there isn’t an image showing. Do not click on any links, text, or images.
2. Select the “View Page Info” option directly underneath “View Page Source”. You will now see a Page Info pop up box with 5 or so tabs on the top.
3. Select the “Media” tab. It will list all of the embedded content from the page. This will include images, flash, audio, etc.
4. Scroll down the list until you see an “Embed” type file. When you locate what you think is the flash ad you want to download, choose the “Save As” button on the bottom right and save it to your hard drive.
5. Last step is that you can right click the .swf file where ever you have stored it locally and select “Open with” option and then select “Other” and under Enable select the “All Applications” drop down and scroll down to Firefox application and then tick the “Always Open With” box and click “Open” button and Firefox will launch a new window with your flash file.
Firefox is amazing huh? I think so too. Enjoy. Here is some screen shots that might be helpful as well.
-Brian
I got an email from one of my buddies in the industy asking how to calculate how much they can afford to pay on a CPM for ads outside PPC using the performance data from advertising on PPC content. Here are some fictious numbers he sent over for the example:
PPC Content Stats:
488,000 Impressions
350 Clicks
18 Conversions
$95.00 Ad Cost
5.6% Click Thru Rate
Ad Cost / Impressions = 1.946
1.946 * 1000 = 0.19 CPM
Does this mean we pay roughly $0.19 CPM?
The only missing piece to this equation is the CPA that they are willing to pay for each conversion. Using these numbers they are currently getting a $5.20 CPA on content ads. If they were able to pay $20 CPA then they should effectively be able to buy CPM traffic on a network like AdBrite for around 0.80 – $1.00 depending on the quality of the placement. I would just use this as a gauge and not be afraid to test out networks like DrivePM, MSN DR, Yahoo Class 2 and Advertising.com. Sometimes you’d be surprised running wider reach categories that your ad might perform in areas that you would of never thought of like Maps, Web Mail and IM messenger placements.
If you want to effectively test display banners you should have a budget of about $10k and should A/B test several ad sizes like 728×90 leaderboards, 300×250 square box ads and 160×600 skyscraper units. I have seen different sizes perform better for different types of businesses. You’ll want to get at least 1M impressions on each banner to get good enough conversion and CTR performance results.
Oh yeah, BTW “eCPM” = effective CPM for you acronym junkies.
