Monthly Archives: September 2009

After creating Flash ads for Google AdWords, I think I have stumbled upon some tips that will save other developers from a lot of debugging. Browsing Google’s AdWords documentation, I found these basic requirements for Flash ads:

Flash ads must be 50K or smaller in size and utilize Flash versions 4 – 8. All Flash ads should support the clickTAG variable.

Even if my ads met these requirements, they would not get accepted by the upload tool. The error message I got was “An error occurred. Please try again later”. Thank you. Very helpful!

I started eliminating code, and finally after removing all references to Tweener, it worked! After some more searching, I found another page called Follow our requirements for Flash image ads. It seems the Tweener package includes calls to Math.random(), and by Google’s second requirements page, random numbers are strictly forbidden.

The lesson is: Even if you have found some requirements, it doesn’t mean you have found them all. And please stay away from Math.random().