OpenX Blog

Just a quick update to let you all know that our SVN/Trac server is about to move to a new hosting centre. The outage should be no more than a couple of hours.

Bonjour les amis,

My name is Matthieu from phpMyVisites. I have been invited to be a guest blogger on the Openads blog. I would like to share my interest and experience in Web Analytics; what would you like me to write about?

Let me tell you a little about myself. I developed phpMyVisites which is an Open Source web site statistics application. I hope that many Openads users will know and use phpMyVisites on their websites. The last version is particularly interesting as it provides a “clicks heatmap” feature (try the demo!).

I know a bit about web analytics data, how to analyze it, which information and actions you could take from your analysis. Web analytics is actually all about taking action to improve your website performance whether it means having more interested visitors, making more revenue online or having more users to register to your amazing social network.

Here are my blogging ideas so far:

1. The top 5 statistics for measure and improve your website’s performance
2. The top 5 statistics to alert you to a website crisis
3. How to measure user traffic reliably

I have two quick questions for you to help me focus my efforts.
Q1: How experienced are you in Web Analytics?
Q2: What would you like me to write about?

Please post a comment with your answers and suggestions. Depending on the response I hope to complete my first blog by the end of the week!

Have fun and enjoy the sun!

Creating an Openads product that works seamlessly with many other popular applications is a great way to make Openads easy to use but we know that’s not enough. If publishers struggle with installation and configuration or have questions as they try to use the product then it won’t matter whether we connect easily with Joomla or Drupal.

So, we wanted to let all of you know that we are looking for someone to join us full-time to help with online publisher support. If you are an Openads user who loves working with our product and loves helping other publishers make more money online then apply and join our team!

We’re pleased to announce the Openads 2.3.38 beta release. This release includes some important bug fixes missing from the 2.3.37 beta release.

This version contains the following updates:

• Fixed upgrade of 2.0 flash banners with converted hard-coded links.
• Fixed 2.0/2.1.29 upgrade paths to correctly set the “Booked” impression value.
• Resolved an issue preventing the application from working after an upgrade from 2.1.29

For full details on the new version, please see the Openads 2.3.38 beta release notes.

Thank you to all of you for your continued feedback. Please continue to report back your experiences in the forum.

Download the new version now »

MijnAlbum are an innovative online photo sharing website. They host over 50 million photos and provide value added services to 800,000 registered users.

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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Related posts:

• 5 steps to beat the basic ad network eCPM
• Optimize your website for higher revenue

Over the next few months we’re going to work to make the Openads interface and workflow better. We’re starting by reviewing the Openads UI and the first step is some interviews with Openads users.

We need your help! We are looking for passionate Openads users who are willing to participate in a paid one-on-one interview about the Openads UI in London.

To participate you will need to be in London and available for an interview on one of the following dates:

• Thursday 17th August
• Friday 18th August
• Monday 21st August
• Tuesday 22nd August

To register your interest fill in this quick questionnaire

A massive thank you to all the developers who have worked extremely hard over the last week to get the new 2.3.37 beta release out.

This version contains the following updates:

• Conversion of Flash hardcoded links was not working on some setups.
• Fixed fatal errors in lg.php, avw.php.
• Fixed ability of Agency accounts to use Targeting Statistics.
• Fixed past statistics migration from MMM v0.1.

For full details on the new version, please see the Openads 2.3.37 beta release notes.

Thank you to all of you for your continued feedback. Please continue to report back your experiences in the forum. Thanks!

Download the new version now »

Best Article Every Day has recently linked to some brilliant examples of the smartest (Technospot) and most unfortunate (Oddee) ad campaigns.

I’m sure most Openads publishers know the horror of discovering an ‘unfortunately placed ad’ on their website or have a personal collection of the best and worst ads that they have unwittingly run.

Share them with us, we’d love to see them!

Ever wondered how the Openads Community is distributed around the world? Well now, thanks to ClustrMaps, you can find out.

ClustrMaps plots the location of website visitors on a world map. It seemed like a fun way to see where the Openads Community is living around the world so we added the widget to the Openads blog and forum templates.

After only a few days it’s clear…. Openads users are everywhere!

There are one or two notable absences at the moment:

• Jason from UpToTen, the man behind the extremely popular 5 steps to beat the basic ad network eCPM article, clearly hasn’t checked the blog this week as we don’t have a dot on Mauritius just yet (big brother is watching Jason!).
• Also, Openads is being used on a number of sites in Africa so hopefully we’ll see them on our map soon too.

Want to be included? Just browse blog.openads.org or forum.openads.org. The map is compiled daily so don’t be too surprised if it takes a while before you see yourself.

For all those keen Openads users and developers out there who use our Subversion repository, we just wanted to let you know in advance that we’ll be making a few changes to where different versions are kept over the next few hours. I’m sure you won’t have any trouble finding the version you want once the update is done, as the main point of the updates is to make the repository layout clearer.

However, the most important change is that the main trunk directory will be changing from Openads 2.0 to Openads 2.3 beta. So, please make sure you switch your Subversion paths before updating, if required!