Sublime Ads

Worked on the dashboard stats for Sublime Ads. I think it’s pretty much complete now. Pretty happy with it. I need to tie up the label colours, but I think that will do for now.

And with the date filter open:

Worked a little bit on Sublime Ads tonight, only around 30 mins. Tweaked some buttons and text. I’d love to launch it soon. Next week I’ll spend time on documentation and work on slightly better embedding options. Then it’s ready as the MVP I imagined.

Done for the day. Tired. I’ll do a little write up on Sublime Ads over the weekend. Also used Nova all day too. Was nice.

I’m really digging these slightly rotated dropdowns in Sublime Ads…

Experimenting with a “day range” picker… works nice. Gonna add a custom date range at some stage too.

Whoop. I have an initial embed script ready for Sublime Ads 🥳

Started work on the JS embed for Sublime Ads. In OTHER news… I am totally for off angles now! Please be aware this will trickle to all my projects from now on. Straightness is BORING. Give it a try if you’re on the beta.

Dedicating a bit of time to Sublime Ads for the next couple of weeks. To warm up I’m trying out some basic “dark” mode support on the holding page.

Interesting how some Ad blockers try to block Ads by looking at the URL structure/parts. Need to think about that a little for the Sublime Ads API… Totally get it though!

Just sent out a few more invites for Sublime Ads. Going to try and finish a few of the outstanding items this week and then work on a “public” launch sometime late July/August.

Figured out how to best handle “embeds” for Sublime Ads. I’ll sketch it out over the week and hopefully get it added next week. That means you can create an embed for your site and use a small snippet of code and BOOM.

I’m about to send out invites to all who have pre-registered on Sublime Ads. I’m going to do another announcement post, but here are some details on limitations to expect for now.

I haven't written about creating Ads on Sublime Ads yet. I was busy with finishing a few things and also found myself trying to finish the "MVP" part of Sublime Ads. Not to mention trying to balance client work also!

So, let's get started with creating an ad and how that looks.

Ad overview

The beauty of the design system is that I could easily bring across similar styling to the Ads, just like categories. Go ahead and read that if you haven't. You'll see similarities between the two.

Again I focused on writing and making it clear what an Ad can be. In hindsight, it could be anything really. Just this weekend I thought I could also add "tools" I use for running my business and implement it on my site - things that include a referral link perhaps. Or I could add variations of t-shirts that I created for Gluon. Anyway, an ad can be anything that has meaning to you.

Anyway, here is the overview screen:

If you've been watching... I'm now using pink as the main "ad" colour.

The hint of what can be an ad only displays when you have no ads set up. It'll show again when you create one though - just for a gentle reminder.

Jumping ahead a little, here is what it looks like when you have a few ads set up. Totally self promoting:

You can see lifetime "taps" here also, so you can gauge how well something is doing. I'll show you the latest ad at the top - so you don't have to scroll too long.

Tapping on an ad will take you to the overview screen for the ad in question. However, let's look at the creation screen.

Create an ad

I wanted something super simple here and something that just worked! Although I'm planning to add a bit more magic to this page, I'm pretty happy with the way it looks.

Again, some info what an ad can be just for a gentle nudge to get that brain moving. Then just some easy to use fields that you can fill in.

The input placeholders are self explanatory I think. Only the Title and URL fields are required here.

Press Create at the bottom and it's all done! If there are any errors, it will let you know.

Ad overview

Once created, you'll go the ad overview page. It will have basic information, as an example:

If there is no image attached, it will use a pink placeholder just to keep it looking nice.

A few bits of information are available to you. First you have the "id" of the ad. This can be used for the API to retrieve a specific ad. Then there is the "public id" - this is used for registering taps and also when using the Sublime Ads redirect URL. It will automatically create it for you.

You can test the responses and URL's using the "try" links. I'll work on laying that out better and give more explanation.

I didn't spend too much time here as I'm still thinking of the best way to lay out information. For now though, this is good enough for me.

Later on, if there are taps for the ad, it will also surface a chart for you - as so:

At the moment the chart gives you the past 7 days of data. I'm working on adding a date filter to this in the coming weeks.

If you have linked an ad to a category, this will also show here:

All pretty simple.

Ad statistics

You can optionally record taps for your ads using the URL provided via the API or by sending a POST request to the API to the "tap" endpoint.

To surface this data I have used simple graphs. As I said it shows 7 days worth of data for now and I'll expand that soon to have a date filter also.

There are different ways stats are tied and counted. Overall, an ad can receive its own tap without being tied to a category. That means you can just target an ad itself. In fact, if it has difficulty finding a category, it will record the tap just for the ad itself.

Depending on your use of the API you can retrieve all ads in the system. Here it will only record taps (if you so wish) for the ad in question. If however you pull in ads through a category then the tap is registered for the ad and category at the same time. The API will give back a slightly different URL so it knows which category is tied to an ad.

So, for example if you had two ads tied to a "Personal Site" category and call the API to return all ads within that category, it will return the URL for the correct endpoint to register the tap for both the ad and the category.

This is useful if you want to measure specific categories.

Here is some super basic test data, with stats tied to a category:

Colour coded for now and you can hover over to see which is which. (Don't know why the dates are in the wrong order here 😅).

In the example above, both ads individually received just over 100 taps. But within the category only 3 in total for the past 7 days. And 4 taps in total for all time. (It's just test data so please don't judge!)

At the bottom of that screen you can see lifetime taps on the ads within the category.

Wrapping up

That's it for now. As you can see I'm trying to continue to keep it simple where I can.

I'm still planning to work more on the charts and to work on a slightly better layout for the ad overview screen.

I’ll be sending out invites for Sublime Ads on Monday the 15th of June to anyone that has pre-registered. It’ll be a “developer preview” and I put together a few notes about it here.

I was dreading chart work for Sublime Ads. Still more to do like a date range picker and better colours etc… However here is real “test” data:

Pretty happy about it.