Using Banners

Banners allow Partners to create announcements that are visible to users of the portal. They have multiple use cases and can be easily customized to fit the right message and audience.

• What Do Banners Look Like?
• Banner Use Cases
• How to Set Up Banners
  • Components
  • Placement and Coloring
  • Timing and Display Order
  • Targeting
• Additional Notes on Banners

What Do Banners Look Like?

Banners are apparent from their colored titles and their bordering. Below, you can see a few examples of banners being placed on the home page and the initial user login page.

Banner Use Cases

Banners are an extremely effective feature because they allow a CloudRadial Partner to reach their audience with messages in an organic and non-invasive way.

Without having to deal with the time and logistical challenges of updating many users, Partners can simply point them to the portal and instruct users to watch for banner notifications for any critical news. This not only increases usage of the portal as a whole but also adds value to it for both the Partner and the end-users alike.

In the end, banners are commonly used for three scenarios:

• Informing users of limited holiday hours, service updates, sales promotions, and more
• Alerting users to upcoming scheduled downtime, security news, outages, and more
• Guiding users to discover new features, applications, guides, and more 

How to Set Up Banners

To set up a banner:

1. Navigate to Partner > Marketing
2. Select the Banners tab (this will be the first tab you'll land on)
3. Use the +Add button at the top right to add a new banner
   
   
   
   
4. Enter your desired Content, Run Dates, and Audience
5. Select Submit at the bottom to finalize your choices

Components

A banner consists of the following components: 

• Content
  • Title, Text, and an optional URL link
  • Placement location of the banner
  • Style, which includes color and position
    
    
• Run Dates
  • Start Date of when the banner should first appear
  • End Date of when the banner should no longer appear
    
    
• Audience
  • The User Groups that the banner should be visible to
  • The Company Groups that the banner should be visible to

Placement and Coloring

Banners can be placed in any combination of the following locations within the portal:

• The Log In page to the portal (aka, the splash screen)
• The Home page
• The Report a Problem page
• The Request Support page (aka, Service Requests)

The banners can either be positioned on the top of the page or on the right sidebar, depending on the partner's preferences.

They also come in a variety of colors. Though there is no right answer, we recommend:

• Blue for information
• Green for success
• Yellow for warnings
• Red for alerts

Timing and Display Order

Banners can be either set to run:

• Indefinitely 
  • To do this, leave the Start Date and End Date fields blank
    
    
• Scheduled to run indefinitely from a certain date onwards
  • To do this, add a Start Date but no End Date
    
    
• Set to run from a certain date to an end date
  • To do this, list a Start Date and End Date

The order of the banners displayed is based on the date of the first display. There are currently no limits on how many banners a Partner can have out at one time. 

Targeting

Banners can be targeted toward companies and users using the same user groups and company groups found within most sections of CloudRadial.

This audience targeting doesn't apply to the banner messages targeted placed on the log-in page because, at that point, CloudRadial can't verify who the user is. 

Additional Notes on Banners

• Banners can only be managed via the Partner > Marketing section of the feature set, via the Banners tab. This applies to the entire tenant - you cannot set banners for individual companies within the portal. 
• There are no character limits on any of these fields within the banner.