How advertising works

JollyBee lets a community turn the places it already meets its audience into sellable advertising inventory. A business books a specific space, the community agrees the terms and controls approval, and JollyBee serves the creative and records its performance.

Most live ads are made from three records:

• A placement is the space being sold: for example an overview tile, event sponsor, newsletter slot or sponsored map pin. The community chooses its public name, placement type, rate and recommended dimensions.
• A campaign is one advertiser's booking against one placement. It carries the objective, agreed rate, optional budget, flight dates, payment state and approval status.
• A creative normally supplies what the audience sees or clicks: an image or structured text, plus a destination URL. A visual campaign can have several active creatives in weighted rotation. Sponsored messages still need an active creative record even though its fields are not displayed, while map pins can work without one.

One campaign books one placement. To buy several different surfaces, book a campaign for each placement; the artwork may be reused when its shape suits both.

Who does what

The community defines and prices its inventory, receives booking requests, negotiates and accepts or declines them, reviews the creative, raises the invoice, controls go-live and can pause or complete the campaign.

The business creates a business profile, completes verification, browses active inventory under Discover communities, submits a booking, uploads creative, discusses the rate, pays an invoice and watches impressions, clicks and click-through rate in its campaign.

Community owners can also enter a campaign themselves for a direct or offline advertiser. That is useful for an existing sponsor, a house ad or an arrangement made outside the business portal.

The campaign lifecycle

The status tells you where the booking is in the workflow:

1. Draft — a community has recorded a campaign but has not put the offer forward.
2. Proposed — a booking is waiting for the community and business to agree. A booking submitted through the business portal starts here.
3. Negotiating — the parties are exchanging messages or counter-rates.
4. Accepted — the rate is agreed. Add and review at least one active creative before going live; a map pin can instead fall back to the linked business website.
5. Scheduled — the campaign is prepared for a later launch, but it is not serving yet. At the agreed time, the community must choose Go live.
6. Active — the campaign may serve when its other eligibility checks pass.
7. Paused — serving stops without losing the campaign, creative or statistics.
8. Completed — the flight is over; historical analytics remain available.
9. Declined — the booking was not approved and never serves.

Payment and campaign status are separate. Paying an invoice marks the campaign paid; it does not override the community's approval or turn a paused, scheduled or completed campaign active.

What has to be true before an ad serves

An ad is eligible only when all of these are true:

• The placement is Active, not archived.
• The campaign is Active. Accepted or Scheduled campaigns do not serve.
• The campaign is still attached to that placement.
• At least one creative is Active, except a sponsored map pin can use the linked business website without a creative.
• Today is on or after the start date and on or before the end date, when those dates were supplied.
• Any payment requirement that applies to the booking has been met.
• The destination has any extra setup its placement needs, such as a sponsored line for messages or a business location for a map pin.

With no start date, an active campaign can begin immediately. With no end date, it remains eligible until the community pauses or completes it. Dates are an additional boundary; they do not change the campaign's status automatically.

For placement types other than sponsored map pins, JollyBee rotates among eligible creatives and campaigns of the same type by creative weight. A weight of 2 gets roughly twice the opportunities of a weight of 1 over time, not a guaranteed two-to-one result on a small number of views. Map pins display eligible businesses and do not use weighted creative rotation.

What the audience sees

Visual units carry a clear Sponsored label and the advertiser name. Their creative links go through JollyBee's tracked redirect before opening the advertiser's full http:// or https:// destination. A map pin without an active creative instead links directly to the business website, so that visit is not recorded as an ad click.

In a demo or test deployment, a JollyBee-hosted web slot with no eligible ad may show a labelled Your creative here placeholder. It is a demonstration of the sellable space, not an advertiser's campaign and not campaign performance. Production payment-enforced deployments hide that placeholder; contact JollyBee support if it appears unexpectedly.

Image units show the artwork as the main content. Text units use the headline, body and call-to-action fields. The current HTML option does not publish arbitrary HTML; it uses the same safe structured fields as a text creative.

Read Advertising creative sizes and specifications before producing artwork.

Performance and reporting

The community's Advertising → Analytics page reports the last 30 days:

• Impressions — eligible ad renders or sponsored deliveries recorded by the serving surface. Server-rendered JollyBee page slots exclude crawler views; cross-domain widget and public serve-API requests do not apply that same crawler check.
• Clicks — visits through the creative's tracked destination link.
• CTR — clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage.

The business campaign page shows its campaign totals. Email ads record an impression after each sponsored email is successfully sent or accepted by the email provider; this is not downstream inbox-delivery confirmation. Printed day-permit sponsors use a tracked QR code, so a scan can still become a measured click.

Sponsored map pins currently record a tracked click when the pin has an active creative, but appearing on the map does not add a map-pin impression.

If a campaign is active but has no traffic, work through the eligibility list above, then confirm that the chosen placement type actually appears on a part of the community experience people are using.