By now, many Commission Junction affiliates are familiar with the SmartZone feature. This tool, located at Get Links > SmartZone Settings in the Publisher control panel, allows a publisher to display a randomly rotated set of up to 25 links of a given form factor—468x60 banners, for example—with a single snippet of JavaScript. Additionally, SmartZones allow the publisher to weight individual creatives, specifying in effect that some will show up more often than others.

Many publishers, however, are not aware that advertisers also have the ability to create SmartZones. Many of those that are aware, frankly, have been disappointed, because most advertisers just don't bother with them. This is a shame, as we will see, because the Advertiser SmartZone offers a great deal of utility to advertisers and publishers alike.

One of the key reasons why publishers like SmartZones is that they enable the publisher efficiently to display ads from multiple advertisers. Clearly, this is not the case with the advertiser version: by definition, any Advertiser SmartZone contains creatives from only a single advertiser. Given this limitation, a publisher might be excused for wondering just what advantage an Advertiser SmartZone might have over the publisher variety.

There are two advantages. The first has to do with efficiency: by publishing a SmartZone, an advertiser can package together a block of creatives designed to work together to sell a particular promotion. By picking up the SmartZone, then, the publisher is able to take advantage of the advertiser's greater domain expertise.

The second advantage, though, is the real winner. Remember that 25-link limit? Well, as it turns out, in addition to standard links, a Publisher SmartZone can also contain Advertiser SmartZones... which themselves can hold up to 25 creatives! In principle, then, the combination of Publisher and Advertiser SmartZones offers a huge increase in the number of creatives a publisher can display with that simple snippet of Javascript: up to 625!

This is a winning combination. To recap, combining Advertiser and Publisher SmartZones offers the following advantages:

• Advertisers can group together creatives that mutually support one another in a useful fashion.
• Advertisers gain increased flexibility, since they can change out or expire ads in a given SmartZone without affecting functionality on the Publisher end.
• Publishers get to display multiple, related links from a given advertiser without having to think about the logistics of managing a promotion... it becomes the advertiser's problem.
• Publishers get to crack the SmartZone 25-link limit!