The Pugpig Smart Banner

The Pugpig Smart Banner is a standalone script that provides functionality to users on a single article page, before they enter the native or web apps. It is a single Javascript file. It allows us to show headers and footers to upsell on the standalone article pages, or to redirect the users to the most appropriate place. These should not be confused with Native App Smart Banners, which are provided by the iOS and Android operating systems.

What it does

The Pugpig Smart Banner has logic that takes the users to the correct place when they follow a deep link to an app page. It can do the following:

• It can show the native iOS and Android smart banners if the user doesn’t have the app installed and we want to promote the apps
• It can automatically redirect you into the Bolt Web app if you don’t want to show the native Smart Banner. This is not recommend for mobile devices.
• It can show a custom header or footer to the pages if you want to show users the content but top/tail it with adverts/upsell information.
• It can redirect to your web site using the canonical URL if we would rather the user landed there than see the page in isolation (let our support team know if you'd like this behaviour to apply)
  
• It includes analytics and Google Tag manager so you can see how the acquisition aspects of your app are working.

How it works

The smartbanner is implemented using a single Javascript file which sits at the root of the app domain at /pugpig-websmartbanner.js. It is referenced by all of the pages processed into the system. It uses browser and user agent sniffing to determine where the user is viewing the content, and takes the correct course of action.

It will drop a cookie (by default, kaldor-pugpig-visited) to remember if a user has clicked the View button to enter the web reader.

Analytics

The analytics generated by the smart banner are useful to monitor how your sharing and acquisition strategy is working. The Smart Banner currently supports:

• GA4
• Google Tag Manager

It has it's own analytics specification. The only Page Views are articles and these are seen as  /Share/PageView.

Configuration

The Pugpig Support Team can make changes for you if you wish to modify the behaviour of your Smart Banner. These changes are made in the Distribution Service.

Changes and Updates

The Pugpig Smart Banner does not change often - you can see the Release Notes. New changes are automatically rolled out to all of our clients. These changes will only affect articles processed after the change is released.