OpenX Blog

Google Adsense is an easy way to display Google text or image ads on even the most modest website. It’s popular among a large number of OpenX users and, since it is easy to set up, it’s a nice way to get into website advertising.

Until today, OpenX could not track Adsense clicks as we do with all other advertising campaigns. Without this, the only statistics about the performance of Google AdSense ads were the number of times ads have been displayed. Given the popularity of Google AdSense among OpenX users this has been a glaring omission which we were keen to resolve.

In latest release of OpenX 2.0 we’ve added a new feature which allows click-tracking of Google Adsense advertising.

All you have to do is to select “Alter HTML to enable tracking of Adclicks” when creating an HTML banner and OpenX does the rest. That check box is a little misleading. We don’t actually modify the HTML since that would be in violation of the Google AdSense terms and conditions. Instead, Google AdSense ads are automatically detected and handled as a special case using some clever Javascript techniques. Special thanks go out to Jim Rutherford for allowing us to integrate his Adsense Click Pepper script into OpenX.

As a result, you can monitor your Google AdSense advertising performance alongside other advertising campaigns within OpenX, and this is the first step to increasing the revenue you make through placing advertising on your website.

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Related links:
Tutorial: Using Google AdSense with OpenX
FAQ: How to display Google AdSense ads using OpenX

The New Year is the time many resolve to make improvements. In order to help improve your website, Openads brings you a new release to help make that fresh start happen!

New Software

New release - Openads 2.0 (formerly phpAdsNew – read about Openads here) includes two important new features:

• Google Adsense click-tracking
  Google Adsense advertising is the most popular advertising program within the Openads community. Previously, the only statistics available to Google Adsense campaigns within Openads was ad views. Now, with the help of the community, we built in the ability to track the number of ad clicks for Google Adsense! This is done without breaking the Terms and Conditions of your Google Adsense contract, and is completely automated.
• Automatic Maintenance
  Some members of the Openads community find it difficult to set up maintenance properly. In fact, there are quite a few do don’t do it at all! Regular maintenance runs are necessary for Openads keep itself healthy. For those who do not want to set up the automated maintenance task, we created auto-maintenance. As long as your website serves banners every hour, Openads will make sure maintenance tasks are run.

New Website

Work on launching Openads continues apace. Visitors to the old phpAdsNew website are now re-directed to the new Openads site, where they’ll not only find the latest downloads, but a great deal more including our new documentation website and the new improved forums. Appropriately, the latest release of phpAdsNew has a new name – Openads 2.0 – and a new logo to confirm it’s place in the Openads family of products.

Matteo takes flight!

These days we can work from any place in the world remotely, but it’s still good to meet people you work with face-to-face. So it was a pleasure for all the Openads developers to meet, at long last, fellow developer Matteo Beccati.

It was Matteo’s maiden aeroplane voyage and fittingly he chose to take it to meet the rest of the Openads team in London. We think it was a relief for him to confirm that the people he has worked with over the years are actually human!