OpenX Blog

In this article we’ll look at the Advertisers and Campaigns statistics screen on the OpenX demo ad server. The demo ad server is loaded with ad serving data from the OpenX websites so there’s some interesting data to analyse.

If you find the terms used here unfamiliar you might like to review the ad server concepts page of the user manual.

Introducing the OpenX demo ad server

The main statistics page for advertisers and campaigns shows the summary performance of all the advertisers and campaigns displayed by the ad server. The key statistics reported are the number of impressions, clicks and overall click through rates.

First, login to the demo ad server here:
http://www.openx.org/products/demo

Looking at the statistics for the 30th of October we can see that:

• We served 677 skyscraper ads for Casale on the main website with an overall click through rate of 2.95%.
• We served 8,287 leaderboard ads for Google on the forum with an overall click through rate of 1.12%

A click through rate of 2.95% is generally considered quite impressive and it seems to indicate that we’ve chosen the right ads for our audience. We serve ads about ad networks because we think they are likely to be relevant to our website visitors who are mainly web publishers looking to make money from online advertising.

But why is Casale performing 2.6x better than Google?

If we were displaying the ads in the same place on the website then the difference would be down to factors like how compelling the different creatives were and whether OpenX publishers had already tried running Google Adsense ads. In our case, the more significant factor is where we are displaying the ads.

Casale ads are being displayed on the main OpenX website and in particular in the ‘Introduction to online advertising’ section where we explain common types of online advertising that web publishers should experiment with. Google’s ads, on the other hand, are being shown on the OpenX forum.

Why does where we display the ads matter?

In general, forums tend to have a much higher proportion of page views per visitor. In our case our forum visitors view twice as many pages as website visitors. Forums also have a higher proportion of repeat visitors.

So how can we improve our click through rates?

To get better performance from Google Adsense we should probably use frequency capping to limit the number of times it is displayed to each website visitor and rotate in some other ad network ads to better use the remaining ad inventory.

What else would you suggest to improve our ad space performance? Through the demo ad server you have access to all the configuration and performance data from our websites.

Post a comment with your suggestions and we’ll try some of them out.

Update:
Sept 2008: I’ve updated links to the new OpenX website and demo ad server.