Ads and Banners

You can add Banners and Ads to your community to customize and brand your community and link to content and events within Gradual, or any external URL or website.

Banners appear at the top of the home page, while Ads appear on the right-hand side of the Content & Forum pages. Add up to 20 banners or ads, and they’ll rotate automatically to catch your members’ attention and drive traffic and engagement.

Banners

These banners promote and link to other parts of the community or external sites and can be fully customized to match your branding. Banners can be JPG images, moving GIF graphics, or mp4 videos. If more than one is uploaded and visible, they will carousel and change every few seconds. There is a limit of 20 banners that can be visible and enabled at one time.

Dashboard settings

Adding, editing, and managing the banners is done in the Settings tab of the dashboard → Page Customization → Home Page after sign-in.

Adding banners to your community home page

1. Log into your dashboard.
2. Select Settings from the main menu → Customization →Page Customization → Home Page after sign-in.
3. Select +New Banner button in the upper right.
4. Upload an image, gif or video and enter the URL where you’d like the banner to link to. Toggle the visibility status 'on' if you’d like the banner to be visible, or 'off' if you’d like it to be hidden.
5. Save your work.

Once saved, this banner will appear in the Banners list and can be toggled on or off, and also sorted to prioritize which banner you’d like to populate first, second, etc.

Video banners

To load a video banner, you must have a video URL ending with .mp4 and .m3u8, and ensure the file size is under 20 MB. To avoid an empty banner before the video loads, and to enable seamless playback after loading, you are also asked to upload a screenshot of the video's first frame.

We recommend a wide aspect ratio for the video, preferably 36:5. Section backgrounds resize automatically based on content and the visitor's browser window size; to minimize cropping, we recommend using videos with a horizontal or landscape aspect ratio.

All details can be found in the dashboard when adding a banner, and selecting the 'Video' banner type:

Ads

Adding ads to your Content and Forum pages

1. Log into your dashboard.
2. Select Community from the main menu, and Ads.
3. Select +New Ad button in the upper right.
4. Upload an image, enter the URL where you’d like the ad to link to and toggle the visibility status on if you’d like the ad to be visible, or off if you’d like it to be hidden.
5. Save your work.

Once saved, this ad will appear in the Ads list and can be toggled on or off, and also sorted to prioritize which ads you’d like to populate first, second, etc.

Here is a video configuring an ad: