OpenX Blog

After my latest guest post on the Openads Blog several people asked me for consulting services and the questions were always the same: how can I use Openads in an effective way as a publisher? I thought it would be useful to answer these questions on my blog.

How do use zones to deliver targeted ads?

The general problem for most webmasters is that campaigns should be active only on parts of the website or show only to specific groups of users.

You can get this result with Openads by either creating several zones and place them when you need them or, alternatively, you could pass extra targeting information to Openads to guide the selection the campaigns. These two solutions are implemented in different ways. For the first solution the targeting logic is part of website while in the second solution all the logic is on the ad server.

We recommend keeping the targeting logic on the ad server because otherwise we would be reinventing something which the ad server already does very well. It also makes it easy to experiment with new targeting techniques.

You will need to define one zone for each position you want display ads in your web template (e.g. Leaderboard Header 728×90). You will only need to create more zones when you want to change your website templates to include ads in different places (e.g. adding a Rectangle 300×250 Sidebar left; Rectangle 300×250 Sidebar right).

Which Invocation Codes do you recommend and how can I pass extra targeting information to Openads?

There are different invocation codes for Publishers and Zones within Openads. We are recommend using publisher codes for efficiency reasons.

You can find the code by clicking the “Invocation Code” tab in the Publisher properties. The Invocation Code is comprised of some javascript which should be placed in the head of the template, a block that sets the OA_Channel variable and one block for every adzone.

So how do you use use those three blocks effectively?

• We recommend making the first block a seperate file (mmm.js) and refer to it at the head of each web page. This is a little more efficient than including it in every page.
• The OA_Channel-Block should be placed in the head of your template and you can add additional targeting data you want to have available for Openads to target on (e.g. var OA_channel = ‘url=/de/blog/;category=3;user=anonymous;gender=male’;).
• Finally, the ad codes for each zones just needs to be included in your template in the locations where the ads should be displayed.

How do manage the extra targeting information I have passed to Openads?

Channels are a great way to organise your targeting data. Lets walk through a simple example:

• Switch from the “Invocation Code” tab to the “Channel Overview” tab and create a new Channel (e.g.: male Users).
• Now choose “Delivery options” and add “Site-Source” as “Delivery Limitation”.
• Choose “Contains” and type “gender=male”
• Finally, save it.

You can create more channels and use them later to apply limitations quickly.

How to create a targeted campaign?

We will use the Delivery Limitations associated with banners to target our advertising. As usual, you will need to start by setting up the Advertiser, Campaign and Banners and then associate the banner with our new Channel by adding a Delivery Limitation.

Once you have selected “Site - Channels” as a “Delivery Limitation” for your banner you will be able to select channels from your publishers channel list.

Have in mind that publisher-channels only appear in the list when the banner or the campaign is already linked to one of the publishers zones. If you have a lot of banners you could use the “Apply limitations to” function to copy limitations. The function is available on the left site at the “Delivery-Options” Tab of a banner.