OpenX Blog

We have prepared a new release of Openads 2.4 which includes bug fixes, resolves upgrade issues and introduces some database performance enhancements. We have also updated the free MaxMind geotargeting database that is distributed with Openads which will make geotargeting more accurate in some situations.

Our thanks go out to everyone from the Openads Community who helped with this release, your support was invaluable.

Find out more in the release notes or download Openads 2.4.2 today.

We’d like to introduce a new Openads publisher: MacNightOwl. Gene Steinberg, is planning to use Openads to manage advertising across all of his sites including:

• The Mac Night Owl
• The Tech Night Owl LIVE
• The Paracast
• “Attack of the Rockoids”

Welcome on board Gene, we hope you find Openads useful.

Would you like to be featured on the Openads blog? We love the chance to feature Openads publishers, contact us and tell us about your Openads website.

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.

Targeting ads using the source parameter by Erik Geurts

I’m pleased to introduce long time community member Erik Geurts and his first contribution to the Openads blog. Erik has prepared a detailed how-to about implementing targeting using source parameters in Openads. This follows on nicely from another guest blog article, Effective ad management using Openads by Tobias Schwarz.

The more you know about your readers the more likely you’ll be able to choose an ad that will pique their interest and trigger their clicking finger. If you can do this you can increase your online advertising revenue. The challenge is working out how to identify which reader is which in a way that’s reliable and easy to manage – Openads is designed to help web publishers do this.

If you are able to effectively segment and target your audience you will benefit in two ways. Firstly, users are more likely to click on ads so click-through-rates will go up. Secondly, you’ll be able to command higher advertising rates for your targeted ad space.

One common and effective way to do this in Openads is using source parameter targeting. Using source parameter targeting you can segment and target ads based on user data or the section of the website that a viewer is browsing.

Two common examples are:

• Websites, like Amazon, that are divided into sections which attract different readers.
• Websites, like Flickr and Facebook, where user profile data can be used for targeting ads.

In this detailed tutorial, Erik Geurts presents a way to use Openads to implement source parameter targeting in a way which makes managing targeting easy and reliable.

Erik is a key forum moderator and active Openads consultant. We are delighted to have his contribution on the Openads blog. Thanks Erik, keep them coming!

To everyone else in the Openads Community, we’d love your contributions too. Please get in touch and send us your contributions, ideas or suggestions.

The database is an important part of Openads. Maybe it is running on the same machine as your adserver or maybe you have a larger site with a dedicated database server. Either way, you want to know everything is running smoothly and when things go wrong you want to know about it quickly.

This is where monitoring comes in. Network monitoring plays a vital role in any production system. You need to know that your web site is accessible and your database hasn’t crashed.

There are a number of different Network Monitoring Systems around, some free and some not so free. Nagios has been around for ages and lots of plugins are available for it, although it is not designed to be a replacement for a full-blown SNMP management application like OpenNMS. According to the OpenNMS website, OpenNMS is the first enterprise-grade network management platform to be developed under the open-source model.

I’m going to show you how to combine the power of OpenNMS with the extensibility of the Nagios plugin system to monitor the InnoDB free space in your database. I won’t go over installation of OpenNMS itself but the latest 1.3 version is pretty straightforward to get going. It comes bundled with Jetty so you don’t even need to worry about setting up a tomcat server to run it (unless you want to).

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This is a translation of a German blog post which was originally published on Tobias Schwarz’s Alinki blog.

We’re pleased to announce the release of Openads 2.4.1. This release fixes known bugs and improves the installation and upgrade process. All users are encouraged to upgrade.

Key improvements include:

• Better installation system checks and error handling
• Added the ability to define a ‘default’ config file
• Fixed bugs in the targeting statistics and zone impression forecasts
• Performance improvements when passing context variables

Find out more in the Openads 2.4.1 release notes or download Openads 2.4.1 today.

Openads will be attending the ad:tech Interactive Marketing Conference hosted in New York next week. We would love to use the opportunity to meet with Openads publishers.

As always, we really appreciate the chance to find out how publishers are using Openads and the things you would like to see us add to the Openads ad server. We’d also like to pick your brains about some ideas we have to help publishers make more money from online advertising.

If we get enough interest then we’ll organize an Openads event during the week.

Please email us if you’d like to meet the Openads team. Include a little background about yourself and how you are using Openads at the moment.

In this article we’ll look at the Advertisers and Campaigns statistics screen on the Openads demo ad server. The demo ad server is loaded with ad serving data from the Openads 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 Openads 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.

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 Openads 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 Openads 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 Openads 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.