Saving Your Ads As They Appear Online

So you’re running an online ad campaign. With all the hype surrounding online ad measurement, sometimes one of the things that gets forgotten is that the appearance of your ad can be fleeting — literally be here today, gone tomorrow. Sure, you have the file of the ad creative itself saved, but have you ever thought about preserving the ad in its actual placement while it’s live and “out there”? With traditional advertising, this is easy to do — you can get a copy of a print ad or a tape of a TV or radio ad. Online is a bit of a different story.

Unlike the magazine where your print ad appeared, web pages don’t stick around. URLs can be changed frequently, meaning that the page your ad was on yesterday might not be in the same place today. Also, most ads are rotated throughout the site. You could hit “refresh” on the page where your ad is scheduled to appear for an hour and not see it. Due to these reasons, bookmarking the page won’t help. Nor will saving the page as an HTML file (as sometimes the images don’t show up). The only sure way to preserve the image of your ad on the site is by using a screen capture tool.

Screen Capture Tools

Most people are familiar with the “Print Screen” function of their computer (pressing the left key, marked “Print Scrn | SysRq” of the 3 most upper right-hand keys on your keyboard allows you to copy onto your computer’s clipboard exactly what appears on your monitor; from here you can paste this image into a document or file using your shortcut keys CTRL + V. An alternative solution is to use CTRL + P to actually print out the image that appears on your screen). The print screen function is limiting, however. Since it only captures EXACTLY what appears on your monitor, it may capture too much or too little of what you actually need or want to save.

More flexible and versatile are screen capture tools. These nifty applications enable you to capture any area of a page on your screen, regardless of how much you may to scroll down or how much you want to crop out. Using your mouse to precisely delineate the boundaries of the snapshot, you can copy a whole Web page (no matter the length) or just your one ad. You can also eliminate extraneous parts through cropping and editing.

These captures are then saved as image files (you may select from multiple types), or you can export the image directly to a printer.

However, these tools can’t do everything. They essentially capture flat images, so they won’t show all of your ad’s frames or any rich media animation.

Benefits

Having a record of ad placements is beneficial to online publishers and agencies alike. Both parties can use these tools to:

• Provide proof of placement and delivery to an advertiser.

   

• Built libraries/portfolios of examples that can used to help close future sales.

   

As you may have guessed, the uses for these screen capture tools are not limited to capturing your ads. They can be used to capture and save images of competitors’ sites at a certain moment in time; they can be valuable in helping to create presentations; and they’re valuable for providing partial information without editing the actual original document or source. Once you begin using screen capture tools, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without them.

Links to Screen Capture Tools:

TechSmith

Capture by George!

Any Capture Screen

SuperClip

 back to top