Tags: We often get questions from people who manage a website and are just starting to learn about Openads. Their first challenge is coming to grips with how it all fits together. Here are some answers to a few of the most commonly asked questions:
Is Openads a component of a content management system?
No, Openads is a stand alone web application which sits next to your content management system. It connects to your website by the Openads tags you insert into your website templates. This means it works on all types of websites, independent of the software you are using to manage your content.
Will I need to ask my webmaster to add/edit/delete campaigns? That could get expensive!
No, once you’re set up you can manage your own ads from within the Openads user interface. This is called trafficking. You don’t need to be a programmer to do this but you will need to get familiar with the Openads user interface.
I have some complicated rules for how I want to decide which ad to display…
Openads provides lots of ways of rotating and targeting ads. Lots of publishers turn to Openads for this very reason. The delivery engine chooses between all the possible ads to display based on the rules you define including the relative campaign priorities, campaign delivery goals and any targeting rules you set up.
Can my developers modify the source code to add features for me?
Yes, Openads is open source software so your programmers are welcome to modify it. This is a great reassurance to people but most people discover that the integration features which already exist are what they need.
Hi, my name is Miguel Galve. I’m learning to use open ads but don’t have any spanish information about this. The openads blog is a great idea. Thank you. Bye.
Comment by miguel galve — November 28, 2007 @ 8:27 am
I have 2 sites the I might be interested in using openads in, but I’m curious to know if all the adds that will be available will be in english? My sites are targeted at the Hispanic community basically in Mexico. Will that be a problem?
Comment by George — December 2, 2007 @ 1:57 am
Hi,
With Openads you can control exactly what banners you wish to display from any ad network or ‘home made’ ads. There will be plenty of networks available to you for targeting at Spanish speaking users.
Openads allows for a GeoIP database which lets you target specific banners against specific user locations.
Comment by Arlen Coupland — December 3, 2007 @ 1:43 pm
OpenAds is a good program for people ready to commit to lot of server load and complexity just to manage their ads. Even then, as it gets really BIG it starts to cost you. We found that 2.4 required a lot more support than 2.0 as well as server load and storage needs.
After looking around, we found the newer hosted AD networks like Tribal Fusion, DART and Right Media really have much more to offer. We ended up going with RightMedia.com because they offered to also help us sell our ad inventory of close to 5 million impressions a day .
We have been able to combine our relationships with Google and 5 other Network AD providers with our in-house inventory. We get frequency capping, no hassle geo-targeting, weighting that actually works, and we save $400 month on a dedicated AD server and eliminated the need to support another server - that was a 20% reduction is systems support for us right there. Even as small as our company is, I think we spend close to $8000 a year on OpenAds to host it with time keeping it supported and all. So its not a FREE AD server by any mean.
So not to be a bummer, I highly recommend it. We used the predecessor server for years with great success, but found as soon as we had real AD serving needs OpenAds turned out to be our biggest liability.
Comment by eni-jack — December 3, 2007 @ 8:11 pm
Hi
I only see documentation about banner ads. I would like to know if OpenX can be used to server auction based search ads?
Thanks
Harsh
Comment by Harsh Deshpande — April 30, 2008 @ 4:46 pm
Can the ads be served from a single server location across various URLs? In another words - Can I install ads on a single server and serve multiple websites across multiple domains?
Comment by Affiate Marketing Tips — May 5, 2008 @ 6:18 pm
Hello, Yes - this is possible and very common. To manage this you define several “websites” (aka. publishers) within the ad management interface.
cheers, Oliver
Comment by Oliver George — May 5, 2008 @ 6:49 pm
Can I display 2 different banners on same place so that it shows the first and then the second without reloading the page?
Comment by guenter — May 28, 2008 @ 12:17 am
Hi Guenter
Yes, it’s possible to reload ads without refreshing the page.
You will need to use the iFrame tag and set the “Refresh after” option. There are some more details here: http://www.openx.org/docs/2.4/userguide/zone-tags
I’d recommend using the forum for more technical questions about this.
http://forum.openx.org
cheers,
Oliver George
OpenX Limited
Comment by Oliver George — May 28, 2008 @ 1:30 pm
Hi,
In follow up to “an the ads be served from a single server location across various URLs? In another words - Can I install ads on a single server and serve multiple websites across multiple domains?” and the reply of “Hello, Yes - this is possible and very common. To manage this you define several “websites” (aka. publishers) within the ad management interface.cheers, Oliver”
Do the website domains need to be all hosted on the same server?
Thanks,
Joe
Comment by Joe Wozny — July 17, 2008 @ 11:03 pm
Hi,
The websites do not have to be on the same server. An install of OpenX on 1 server/domain can serve banners to any website/server/email/application which will accept the types of invocation tags: Image, Javascript, iFrame, or XML-RPC.
Cheers,
Arlen
Comment by Arlen Coupland — July 18, 2008 @ 7:07 am
Hi,
I’ve been trying to find a good hosting company to run OpenX while serving ~500K ad impressions a month. Anyone have any suggestions?
Comment by culture webmaster — August 3, 2008 @ 7:11 pm
Just learned about OpenX from my friend. Installed it and set everything up in some three hours. It was quite easy after taking the introductory tour.
At our company we were looking for this solution already for months.
Thank you very much indeed.
Comment by Brands-and-Jingles — September 29, 2008 @ 12:32 am
I am curious if any OpenX publishers are having any difficulties with getting Chitika *Premium* ads to run through the ad server. We are trying to finalize a tech note for using our ads within OpenX and I would appreciate any comments, questions, requests and feedback. Thank you.
jeff at chitika dot com
Comment by Jeff Sable — October 22, 2008 @ 12:23 pm
hi, i just use openx for my website, and when i look at the database, i realize that the table storing the impression will become very big in a short while
does openx has any feature to tackle this??
cheers,
andy
Comment by andy — November 26, 2008 @ 6:49 am
Hi,
I’m currently working on an advertising site project. Here we are supposed to map our site with openAds for generating invoice from the ad engine(openAds say) based on the ad statistics. As i’am new to this i need a clear idea about the integeration with openAds. If possible, kindly send some technical documentation regarding this.
Cheers,
Marshal
Comment by Marshal — January 2, 2009 @ 6:46 am
@andy : the data_raw tables are automatically pruned by maintenance depending on your Grace Period setting in your Maintenance Settings page. The lower the value in seconds, the less raw data which is kept
@Marshal : Go to Community->Developers in the main site navigation to read about the API and see a tutorial. Also watch out for 2.7-beta which introduces the new plugin system for OpenX
Regards,
Arlen Coupland
OpenX
Comment by Arlen Coupland — January 2, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
Is it possible to reload the ads via a javascript command? So say, i reload a good part of the page using ajax and i want to reload the ads as well, creating a virtual pageload for my statistics tracking. If the main content is reloaded i want the ads to be reloaded as well, as if the user had clicked on another page on the site. Thanks!
Comment by Mike — January 9, 2009 @ 9:21 pm
I would like to know how to track the conversion? and how to add the tracker to a campaign
Comment by Sunil — April 2, 2009 @ 3:41 pm
Thank you for the information. I have a network of websites and more joining all the time. They are in a clearly defined categories. Our business model is simple.We set up the technology on their web page(s) and take a small percentage of the advertising dollars. The advertising is neither PPC or CPM; it is straight pay for placement per month.
I have two questions:
1. Is this solution good for this type of model?
2. Is there any upload tool so that I can easily migrate my existing sites?
Comment by Melbourne Translator — April 23, 2009 @ 8:43 pm
As an answer to Culture Webmaster, we are using Go Daddy. They have been reliable with other hosting. I would call them. We are in the process of trying this solution so I will let you know in a few months (assuming we get that traffic).
Comment by Phigit — April 23, 2009 @ 8:58 pm
Anyone have a GoDaddy account? I need to migrate my shared servers to a dedicated server and not sure how all of that works.
Comment by andy rooney — June 2, 2009 @ 10:36 pm
I would like to know if the server where OpenX is hosted goes off then what will happen to my ads. I mean what the ads space (zone) will display. nothing? error page?
How can i display standard ads or alternative source of ads if the server hosting OpenX faced downtime.
Pls reply.
Comment by Prashant — June 3, 2009 @ 1:17 pm
I’ve been looking around for articles similar to this but never found one that actually was valuable such as this. Glad I found this place!
Comment by Candy T. — June 5, 2009 @ 1:03 am
Anybody got a fix for the m2m error
Comment by Scott — August 9, 2009 @ 12:06 am
I am trying to server ads from the same server and domain as they will appear on. Imagine that my main site is example.com, and my openX is installed in example.com/openx.
For some reason I can’t get ads to show on the main site. If I embed the script on other servers - even my local development server on my laptop - it works like a charm. But I need the main site and the ad server on the same server, and this seems to stop ads from showing. The JavaScript simply outputs an empty string.
Why might this not be working?
Any settings I need to change?
Any code I need to tweak?
Martin
Comment by Martin Joergensen — August 20, 2009 @ 6:33 pm