Ad Templates Tutorial

Ad templates define the “look and feel” of your listings. Essentially, ad templates contain the HTML for your ads with special “template tags” that allow you to re-use a template for multiple ads. With ad templates, ChannelAdvisor Merchant allows you to easily keep a consistent appearance to all your listings. This will both save you time and help you establish a brand and identity in the marketplace.

Creating ad templates does require some knowledge of HTML or a familiarity with an HTML editor. We suggest using a “WYSIWYG” editor such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Ad templates use specialized “template tags” so that the same template can be used for many different items. Template tags are special tags that tell our software when and where to insert certain information about the item. For example, the {{ITEMTITLE}} tag tells Merchant to insert the item title as defined in your inventory into the position where this tag is located.

By using template tags, Merchant gives you the ability to control the appearance of all your ads using only a few ad templates. Additionally, if a tag exists in the template but an inventory item contains no data for that tag, then nothing will appear for that tag in the actual ad. This allows you to use a single ad template for many different items.

To create a new ad template, do the following:

1. Go to the Ad Templates view (Inventory > Ad Templates)
2. Click
3. Create the HTML for your ad using a separate HTML editing program.
4. Insert template tags in the appropriate locations in the HTML code.
5. Copy the HTML code from your HTML editing program (Ctrl-C)
6. Paste that HTML code (Ctrl-V) into the “Body” section of the Edit Ad Template page.
7. Click

To make your ad templates more flexible, you should use template tags whenever possible. The following steps explain how to use and insert template tags into your ad templates.

1. From the list of tags, choose the tag you need and the name will appear in the “Insert Tag” box. The tag names are fairly self-explanatory.
2. Highlight the tag text in the “Insert Tag” box and copy it (Ctrl-C).

Note: If you click the Insert button, the template tag will be inserted at very end of your code, which is probably not what you want.

3. Position the cursor in the exact position in your HTML code where you want to have the tag appear and paste it in (Ctrl-V).
4. After you have finished creating your ad template, click to view your template in a new browser window. When you preview the ad template, you will still see the template tags.

Note: If you use software that prevents pop-ups, you will need to enable pop-ups to use the preview function.

Original HTML Code	HTML code with Template Tags
<H1>My Item</H1> <P>Below is a picture of my item</P> <IMG SRC=”..\images\item_image1.jpg”      HEIGHT="25" WIDTH="50"> <P>Buy this item now for $5.00</P>	<H1>{{ITEMTITLE}}</H1> <P>Below is a picture of my item</P> <IMG SRC=”{{IMAGE(ITEMIMAGEURL1)}}”      HEIGHT="25" WIDTH="50"> <P>Buy this item now for      {{ITEMBINPRICE}}</P>

Generally, any difficulties you encounter creating ad templates are caused by images. Remember that static images, such as your company logo, should appear when you preview the ad template, but item specific images inserted with template tags will not appear.

Custom Template Tags

In addition to the default template tags, you can also use custom template tags from your Classifications (Inventory > Classifications). These custom tags are automatically created from the attribute names in your classifications. The custom tags are simply the attribute name in all capitalized letters enclosed in two sets of curly braces (e.g. {{MY TAG}}).

Your custom tags will appear in the “Select Template Tags” text box when you create or edit an ad template. If you insert those tags into your ad templates, then the information from the inventory item will be inserted into your ad automatically.

In the example below, the classification named “CAMERA” has an attribute field named “lens” that we are going to use as a custom template tag in our ad template.

On the Edit Ad Template page, the lens attribute will appear as a custom template tag that we can use in the HTML for the ad template. When a listing is actually created in the marketplace, the appropriate information for the {{LENS}} tag will be inserted into the ad.

Before you post any items to the marketplace, you should preview your ad templates and ads to make sure that they appear as expected.

To preview an ad template:

1. Go to the Ad Templates view (Inventory > Ad Templates)
2. Select the preview icon () in the Ad Templates view or click at the bottom of the Edit Ad Template page. This will open a pop-up containing the ad template.

Note: If you use software that prevents pop-ups, you will need to enable pop-ups to use the preview function.

Any static images in the template will appear normally but data for template tags will not be inserted. Instead, you will see any template tags as text in the preview window.

Once you have created ads using the ad template, you can see how the actual ad will appear in the marketplace. To preview a complete ad:

1. Go to the Ads view (Inventory > Ads)
2. Click the preview icon ()

This will again open a pop-up window containing the ad but unlike the ad template preview, all template tags will be replaced with relevant data about the item. We recommend that you preview all ads before scheduling them to post to the marketplace.