How do I set up banners? and report on banner ads?

Banner management in admin

You can control/add/edit/delete your banners in Admin > Tools > Banner Manager. (click this link for more details)

To add a new banner, click the New Banner button. To edit an existing one and change its link, picture, etc, click on the banner you want to change, and click the Edit button.

You can enable and disable any particular banner by clicking on the red/green status button.

You might want to set the banner status to off for banners you don’t want to show until you are more familiar with them so you can use them as examples.

You are not obligated to show any of the banners distributed with Zen Cart.

Images used in banners are typically uploaded to your server’s /images/banners directory.

Banners are organized into banner groups. Each of the three header banner positions and three footer banner positions in a template can display one banner group. The mapping from position to group is done in the Layout Settings configuration page, as shown below.

There are 2 styles of banners: sidebox banners and wide banners

Sidebox Banners are narrower and designed to fit in a sidebox.

Wide Banners are designed to span the width of your page. The images should be wide, but not too tall.

You can give almost whatever group name you want to a banner. Banners in the same group will be randomly displayed one at a time in the position indicated in Layout Settings (see below).

Banner sizes are your choice. There are industry standard “ad” sizes you could consider for the sake of consistency, but you can make them any size that you want and mix and match the sizes depending on your layout.

Keep in mind that using industry-standard sizes might get your banners treated as “ads” and therefore ad-blocking browser plugins might hide them.

Positioning Banner Groups

You control which group of banners is “displayed where” by editing the “Banner Display Groups” position group names under Admin > Configuration > Layout Settings.

If you assign more than one banner to a certain group, it will randomly pick one from that group whenever that group is asked to be displayed.

Only one banner is displayed at a time in any banner position. (There is an exception to this: the BannersAll sidebox, which displays all banners assigned to its group, in the sort order you specify.)

In the default template the following are where these banners will be displayed:

Header Positions for Banner Groups Footer Positions for Banner Groups

To set each of these three header and three footer areas to a banner group, use these settings in Admin > Configuration > Layout Settings:

Banner fields in Layout Settings

Technical note for coders:

By default the banner groups are internally numbered and displayed using template parameters as follows:

Banner Display Groups - Header Position 1 = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET1
Banner Display Groups - Header Position 2 = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET2
Banner Display Groups - Header Position 3 = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET3
Banner Display Groups - Footer Position 1 = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET4
Banner Display Groups - Footer Position 2 = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET5
Banner Display Groups - Footer Position 3 = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET6
Banner Display Groups - Side Box banner_box = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET7
Banner Display Groups - Side Box banner_box2 = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET8
Banner Display Groups - Side Box banner_box_all = SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET_ALL

How do I generate a report on banner advertising?

Banner statistics are tracked on an ongoing basis. When you open Admin > Tools > Banner Manager, you can see the last 3 days’ details on-screen.

For more information, under the “Action” column, you see a small icon of a chart.

Chart icon

Click on that icon to view Banner Statistics for day/month/year.



Still have questions? Use the Search box in the upper right, or try the full list of FAQs. If you can't find it there, head over to the Zen Cart support forum and ask there in the appropriate subforum. In your post, please include your Zen Cart and PHP versions, and a link to your site.

Is there an error or omission on this page? Please post to General Questions on the support forum. Or, if you'd like to open a pull request, just review the guidelines and get started. You can even PR right here.
Last modified August 1, 2024 by Scott Wilson (b20d36a6).