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MijnAlbum are an innovative online photo sharing website. They host over 50 million photos and provide value added services to 800,000 registered users.
MijnAlbum make extensive use of Openads and have extended it to dynamically personalize the ads they serve – the result is increased click through rates and, ultimately, more sales.
I asked Jappie about his experiences using Openads and about their ad templating system.
OA: Hi Jappie, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Jappie: It’s great to hear from you and to see such a vast increase in activity, marketing & development around the Openads product of late!
OG: It sounds like you’re a long time user of Openads.
Jappie: Yes, we have been using Openads (then phpAdsNew) since 2004. At that stage one of my company’s founders was working at another top website in the Netherlands. He suggested we try it out and we’ve been using it ever since.
OG: Tell us a little about MijnAlbum?
Jappie: MijnAlbum is one of 100 most popular websites in the Netherlands and is #1 in the area of photo sharing. It’s also the cheapest photo-printing provider in the Netherlands.
We have approximately 360,000 active sharing members and a total of approximately. 800,000 registered accounts. In a typical day, around 140,000 photos are uploaded in high-resolution and shared in a variety of ways. We allow members to do things like setup their own domain name to show their photos, send photos to mobile phones and print them on things like t-shirts, curtains, canvas etc…
Recently we added the option to plot photos on a Google-map. Now over 50,000 photos are tagged with a location. We are planning more cutting-edge technologies with photos in the future.
OG: What advertising do you carry on MijnAlbum?
Jappie: Openads serves around 400 million ad impressions each month including banner and textlink ads.
Most of our impressions are contracted by our sales-team. We create most of the banners we run ourselves too. Openads is flexible enough to be able to handle any kind of banner so we are able create promotions which suit every advertiser.
We are also dynamically personalizing banners with images, movies and text using a templating system we added to Openads. This has had positive effect on click-through rate and, ultimately, increased sales.
For example, we can include photos in Flash-movies and show visitors their photos scrolling through a printer or hanging on the wall of a room seconds after they uploaded these photos to our site! They love it.
OG: That’s a clever idea, I’m sure other Openads users would be interested to hear how you implemented that.
Jappie: It’s really quite a simple system.
We extended the Openads local mode invocation-technique so that it loads ad through a templating-engine.
We include custom tags (for example [LastUploadedPhoto]) in our ads as instructions for what content should be inserted.
When Openads serves the banner, our PHP-code detects and replace the tags with the dynamic content and outputs the final banner, textlink or Flash movie.
OG: What are the most important features of Openads for you?
Jappie: From a technical standpoint: efficiency and being able to load ads directly into PHP for our templating system.
Being able to extend the Openads local mode invocation-technique has been critical in allowing us to deliver truly dynamic and cutting-edge banners at *lightning* fast speeds!
Furthermore, we find it very useful to be able to target at keywords. Around 97% of the photos in our database are tagged with a category-keyword. We can attach keywords to our campaigns and target them to be served above relevant photo albums. This targeting has another been another big win for click-through rates.
Finally, Openads scales perfectly across our 30+ load balanced web servers and yet it is efficient enough to run on only 1 database server-backend!
OG: Thanks Jappie, it’s been very interesting talking with you. Thanks for telling us about how you’re using Openads at MijnAlbum and, especially, your templating system.
Jappie: Thank you for your time. I think Openads is the best ad-solution there is. It is extremely dynamic and expandable when you integrate it into a native PHP-website. The fact that it comes free is remarkable. Good luck in the future!
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