OpenX Blog

This is a very exciting time for us at OpenX. Just yesterday we launched OpenX Hosted. This is a huge step forward and should go a long way towards making it easier for our publisher community to benefit from our ad serving technology, and hopefully will encourage a new generation of publishers to use the full power of OpenX to take control of their advertising.

It feels like it’s a good time to reflect on what we are trying to achieve and why.

Our User Focus

Back in the early summer, we conducted a very comprehensive survey of our users. This survey included active users, users who were considering using us and also users who had stopped using OpenX (yep, we do have a few of those). We’ve also increased our dialogue with users since then with more OpenX Days (in Germany, LA & New York), blogs, newsletters and many, many one-on-one conversations with all kinds of users.

Four very clear major needs came out of all these discussions:

1. A hosted version of the OpenX ad server
2. More support options
3. A simpler, more flexible product
4. Help increasing monetization

We’ve taken this feedback to heart and are doing everything we can to act upon it.

Here’s some of the progress we’ve made:

OpenX 2.6 - Approaching 10,000 publishers already

In July we released OpenX 2.6.

2.6 features comprehensive APIs for increased flexibility and interoperability with other systems; a simplified UI (including a new dashboard); a faster, unified ad tag; better delivery algorithms; multi-level account access controls and a host of other features.

We’ve already seen fantastic adoption of OpenX 2.6 In the three short months since the launch 2.6 has grown to nearly 10,000 ad servers! If you are not on 2.6 yet and are interested, it’s very easy to join this quickly growing group by upgrading from an earlier version.

The Professional Services and Support team is growing

Our professional services team is growing and is taking on more publishers who need training, consulting or custom development work. We are also offering premium support packages in clear response to our community’s need. Check out our new services here.

Of course we are continuing to support our free forums with the efforts of terrific team members and ad serving gurus like Arlen Coupland as well as adding Michal Czosnyka to the team so we have more capacity.

OpenX Hosted launched yesterday!

Now we’ve delivered the hosted version of OpenX.

OpenX Hosted lets publishers focus on making great content and selling their ad space and eliminates the need to install and maintain software. You can sign up easily and fast here.

OpenX Hosted includes all of the functionality of the download product and is completely free for all publishers serving up to 25 million ad impressions per month. We’ve created premium packages which bundle extra support and services for larger publishers. More detailed information is here.

Of course, as ever, our downloadable version remains available here.

The OpenX plug-in framework is coming

Our tech team is now hard at work extending OpenX’s flexibility further with OpenX 2.7.

2.7 is focused on a comprehensive plug-in framework that will make OpenX even more easily customizable and extensible. We’re expecting to deliver a public beta in the coming month.

We have already been working with a great small group of alpha testers from within our developer community. We would love to engage with more people from within the community to help develop exciting, new features for our users. If you’d like to get involved, Chris Nutting leads our community developer efforts – you can reach him on IRC or the forums.

Lastly, stay tuned for updates on the OpenX Market

The OpenX Market is a new project to help publishers sell their ad space for full and fair value.

You can participate in the pilot program by making your ad space available for bidding through OpenX Hosted. There’s no cost, nothing to lose and its super-simple to participate. Learn more here.

We very much hope everything we have done over the past few months and are now working on is really going to help everyone in our community grow their business by making your online advertising efforts easier and better.

We’re also confident there are bunch of things we could be doing better :). We’d love to hear from you, whether you’re happy with something, want to get more involved in the community, have a question, a suggestion or a criticism.

The more we hear from you, the better we can be.

Thanks

Erik Geurts, Consultant and event host

The OpenX community event in Amsterdam will take place in two weeks time on Thursday, November 13. It’s a free event and everyone is invited. 

View the agenda for the event and get an idea of what to expect.

Judging by the registrations so far, on the day you will meet a really interesting mix of new and experienced OpenX users, along with people evaluating the software.

Register now!

Today we are thrilled to announce the launch of OpenX Hosted. Now web publishers everywhere can sign up to use the hosted version of the OpenX Ad Server.

We’ve opened up OpenX Hosted for free to publishers serving up to 25 million ad impressions per month and created professional and enterprise packages to give big publishers the additional service and support they need to manage their businesses.

Here’s what our beta testers are saying:

“OpenX Hosted is a really cool product. I’ve used OpenX Ad Server for years now, and OpenX Hosted gives me all the benefits without having to maintain my own ad server. As an affiliate myself, I rely on OpenX to help me manage my ad space and make more money online.”
Shawn Collins, Affiliate Summit

“OpenX Hosted lets us focus on what we do best, which is creating great content and selling ads for that content. Now we don’t have to worry about upgrades, hosting, ad server performance. OpenX Hosted takes all of that out of the equation so we can devote more resources back into making our sites great”
Dusty Davidson, BrightMix

Hundreds of publishers helped with testing and gave feedback which shaped OpenX Hosted. Our thanks go out to everybody – your efforts have helped us greatly - much appreciated!

Finally, we’d love to hear what you think. We’ll be hanging out in the OpenX chatroom and responding to blog comments so please post questions and share you thoughts.

Get OpenX Hosted today

Thirty years ago, on October 21st 1978, Frederick Valentich disappeared in unexplained circumstances while piloting a light aircraft towards King Island, Australia. Valentich had reported via radio that an unidentified craft flew at high speeds dangerously close to his plane and later hovered over his aircraft. Radio contact was lost soon after this report, and no trace of him or his plane was ever found. Our condolences go out to the friends and family of Mr. Valentich on this anniversary. We are definitely intrigued by the circumstances which point to a possible UFO encounter. Or perhaps it was just an advanced plane being tested by the ever powerful and meddling Australian Army. Or perhaps it was a vehicle from the future being joy-ridden by some time travelling teens from the year 2000.

This doesn’t have much to do with today’s topic, but it is an example of how sometimes extreme intros are needed in order to draw users from their RSS reader onto your website to read the full article. Adding simple banners into your RSS feed would be a useful way of gathering lost impressions due to those RSS lurkers who won’t click through to your article even if you promise that the full article will have the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Serving banners into your RSS feed is actually pretty simple to accomplish, but there are some limitations. Some quick notes:

• You can’t be quite sure what tool a client is using to read the RSS feed and what limitations that tool has. To be safe, you should avoid Javascript and other rich media (flash, video).
• Your RSS feed is likely to have quite a few entries on one ‘page’ so you probably won’t be using different zones, but will repeat the same zone ID repeatedly.
• You don’t want to alienate your RSS readers. Don’t over populate the feed with banners, keep them tastefully placed and make it obvious that they are banners and not actual content.

So, to accomplish this with OpenX all you require is:

• An image banner (or three [or four]). These can be added as Local Webserver, Local SQL, or External Image banners.
• A banner zone with the above image banner(s) linked to it.
• The image invocation tag for the above zone.

Now, you will need a bit of knowledge of how your website works to create the RSS feed. You will want to add the image invocation tag to the file which generates the RSS feed. This will vary depending on your CMS/blog/forum/homemade software.

The important part is that you need to add code to the invocation tag to make it function as best as possible. The tag looks like this:
<a href='http://demo.openx.org/delivery/ck.php?n=a3b54d5d&cb=INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE‘ target=’_blank’><img src=’http://demo.openx.org/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=23&n=a3b54d5d‘ border=’0′ alt=” /></a>

You need to make sure that the ‘n’ variable is unique for each invocation tag output to the screen - however the value should match within a tag (meaning: the <a> tag and <img> tag should have the same value, but the following set of <a> and <img> tags should have a new matching value). This is explained in this FAQ. A useful value to use for the ‘n’ variable would be the article ID, as each article should have a unique ID. If you don’t have a unique value for each invocation tag, or if the values don’t match within a tag, then the banner click-through won’t function properly.

The other action required is to replace ‘INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE’ with a … you guessed it … random number! This is explained in this FAQ. However in that example Javascript is used, which we want to avoid. So instead you should just generate a random number using whatever programming language your site uses. The number needs to be randomly generated on each page impression to ensure that a viewer’s browser does not cache the banner image or the click destination (the ‘cb’ variable name stands for ‘cacheBuster’).

So, using basic PHP the image tag in the end might look something like this:
<a href='http://demo.openx.org/delivery/ck.php?n=<?php echo $article[ID]; ?>&cb=<?php echo rand(); ?>‘ target=’_blank’><img src=”http://demo.openx.org/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=23&n=<?php echo $article[ID]; ?>” border=”0″ alt=”" />

And after the page is generated it will look something like:
<a href='http://demo.openx.org/delivery/ck.php?n=28&cb=12343‘ target=’_blank’><img src=”http://demo.openx.org/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=23&n=28” border=”0″ alt=”">

A real life example, using OpenX, can be seen on ReadWriteWeb’s RSS Feed.

Hopefully this article shows you that it really isn’t too complex to achieve and that advertisers are likely to be very interested in such placements. Make sure that any advertisers you sell directly to know that you can deliver into your RSS feed and they will most likely wish to have separate rates for RSS vs. non-RSS impressions. They may want to see some historical CTR stats of the RSS banners first.

Does anyone have experience with the pricing and results which they’d like to share, or about the technical requirements for placement of banners in their RSS feed? Please share!

“Sometimes your success is your undoing” - someone famous

It’s every ad trafficker’s nightmare, a very happy salesperson tells you that ‘Client Y’ has just bought another 50k impressions and wants them to deliver by the end of the month. You try and explain that Client Y’s campaign for the initial 100k is only just delivering but to no avail, you are going to have to make some changes!

OpenX defines three types of ad campaigns: exclusive, high priority and remnant. As you might imagine, the ad server will attempt to deliver the exclusive campaigns to the exclusion of all else. Next, the high priority campaigns will be delivered and finally, remnant inventory will be given the chance to fill any gaps.

If you oversell, the practical implication is usually that you have sold more direct ad campaigns than you can deliver, so you need to tell the ad server which one to give priority to. This is where the priority system fits in. Each high priority campaign has a priority level set between 1 and 10. Campaigns with a higher priority will be given precedence meaning that all things being equal (e.g. no targeting) a campaign with a higher priority will be delivered to contract. It is also worth remembering that if a zone is not fully allocated then the prioritisation does not make a difference so it may be the campaign’s targeting that is limiting its delivery.

Ultimately, you have a finite inventory. In this situation your ad server will do everything it can to make sure the most important ads are displayed based on the rules you define, but if you’ve over sold your inventory then something has to give. This means you need to make some hard decisions and tell the ad server how you want this situation to be handled.

Here are some helpful tips…

Step 1 – Resist the temptation to just increase the campaigns priority (or weight)
It is key to remember that campaign priority is relative so having all your campaigns as Priority 10 will not help because the delivery engine will not be able to determine the optimum order for delivery.

Step 2 - Double check the campaigns existing settings just to ensure it is set up as expected

• What priority level is it? (Exclusive / High / Low)
• If it is a high priority, what priority level is assigned to it?
• If it is exclusive or low priority, what weight is assigned to it?
• What distribution settings are applied to the campaign? (e.g. is there a limit to the number of impressions per day?)

Step 3 - Check the prioritisation of other campaigns that are competing on the same zones
Look at the probability screen for the zones that a campaign is linked to, this tells you the % chance that a campaign will be delivered for any given impression. If the campaign has a very low % score, find out why the other campaigns have a higher probability; if the campaign you are focusing on is a higher business priority then reduce them.

Click to view full-size

Step 4 – Adjust the campaigns priority & targeting
If the campaign and its competing campaigns are correctly set up then you are going to have to make some changes, but often a re-prioritisation or the broadening of a campaign’s targeting will help you find some additional impressions. The key thing to remember is that changes made to allocate extra inventory to one campaign will impact others.

Let us know how you manage these issues…

For further information join in the OpenX community forum on managing inventory.

We get asked all the time by our publishers how best to configure OpenX Ad Server to make it easy to sell directly. The answer is (as always) that there are many different ways, but outlined below is a configuration that should take care of many cases.

Basically, there are three main ways that I hear publishers sell their websites:

1. Sponsorship, campaigns with many custom elements (placement, integration with email lists, customised ad creative). Payment is usually a fixed fee for a period of time (e.g. homepage takeover for a month).
2. Guaranteed, campaigns with guaranteed impression targets, targeting criteria, frequency capping, and/or placement on specific web pages. Fees are usually high CPM (cost per 1000 impressions).
3. Category, where the publisher site is part of a group of websites with a very similar audience. Fees are usually charged as CPM, but not as high as direct campaigns. Sometimes, CPC or CPA campaigns that are proven to work are sold as category buys as well.
4. Remnant, where all unsold ad inventory goes for revenue share deals. The publisher gets paid if the advertiser gets results (e.g. cost per click - CPC, cost per acquistion - CPA). Affiliate programs or Google AdSense usually are loaded as remnant campaigns.

OpenX is designed to handle each of these cases. (I should point out that some of these trafficking techniques are fairly advanced but they can make a big difference.)

Sponsorship
For sponsorship opportunities, OpenX has created a campaign type called ‘exclusive’. What this means is that an ad marked as ‘exclusive’ will show EVERY time it can (e.g. frequency capping and delivery limitations are still enforced), in front of all other campaign types. When two campaigns are marked as ‘exclusive’, then they are rotated according to the campaign weight.

Guaranteed and Category Buys
Guaranteed campaigns, as well as Category campaigns, use the ‘High’ campaign type. This type will deliver before the ‘Low’ campaign type. There are two considerations when booking guaranteed and category buys:

Campaign Priority
When you sell a guaranteed campaign, move the campaign priority (note that this is different than the campaign weight!) to 7 (out of 10) or so. Make the campaign priority for category buys about a 3. What this means is that OpenX Ad Server tries to deliver the campaigns with the higher priority first, before attempting to deliver lower priority campaigns. If you are oversold, you can still modify the priorities (e.g. moving a very important guaranteed campaign up to an 8 ) in order to let OpenX know who to allocate impressions to.

Zone Chaining (Advanced Technique)
Usually publishers who sell by category have many different websites (and zones) which fall into a category. An effective way to aggregate all of these websites is to use zone chaining. Follow these steps for zone chaining:

1. Create zones for each website in the category, and place the tags in the HTML of the site. For example, Zone 1: Joe’s Auto Blog; Zone 2: Corvette Enthusiast; Zone 3: Driving Holidays.
2. Create a zone which serves as the category. For example, create Zone 4: Auto, in a new publisher called Categories.
3. In each of the site specific zones, navigate to the ‘Chain Settings’ section of the ‘Advanced’ tab, select ‘Display the selected zone instead’, and select the category zone from the dropdown list. For example, in Zone 1: Joe’s Auto Blog, select Zone 4: Auto from the zone chaining settings.

Now when you sell a category campaign, you can link the campaign directly to the category, by selecting Zone 4: Autos in the ‘linked zones’ section of a campaign or banner.

Remnant
The last type is Remnant, which is the ‘leftover’ bin for all ad impressions that have not yet been sold. Campaigns with this type will only serve if all other campaigns do not, or cannot display. Since the amount of ad inventory that goes to Remnant campaign types is highly variable (depending on the volume needs of all of your other campaigns), you should not allocate Remnant inventory to any guaranteed campaigns. Usually advertisers that have revenue share, like Google Adsense, are placed here. If there is more than one campaign, they will be rotated according to the campaign weight.

This gives you a good start on how to set up your campaigns and zones for direct selling. If you have any other advice, or questions about some specifics, please do respond by either leaving a comment below, or on our forums.

Related links:
OpenX Blog: How do you package direct ad sales?

Update:
Link to new blog has been added to this post

One of the great things about the internet is that there are so many ways to find people with common interests and to share ideas and advice. From social networking groups such as Facebook / LinkedIn etc and social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg to micro-blogging sites like twitter, the opportunities to connect with people are enormous.

But where can you find people in the OpenX community, people with an interest in online advertising or people with an interest in online publishing?

Here are some OpenX-specific groups we’re involved in which you might find useful…

LinkedIn
Join the OpenX online advertising professionals group on LinkedIn
Join the OpenX consultants group on LinkedIn

Facebook
Become an OpenX fan on Facebook

Twitter
Follow OpenX on Twitter
See what people are saying about OpenX or OpenX Hosted

MyBlogLog
Join the OpenX MyBlogLog community

Digg
Most recent OpenX related digg stories
Most popular OpenX related digg stories

Delicious
OpenX tagged bookmarks
Planet OpenX: a selection of OpenX community bookmarks

StumbleUpon
OpenX related recommendations

Flickr
Photos tagged with OpenX

Where else do you go to meet people interested in online advertising or web publishing? Where would you like the OpenX team to participate? Let us know!

In mid-September LinkedIn, the social networking site for business professionals, announced it was branching into the ad network space. It now sells ad space on other publishers’ sites, as well as its own. (It also lets those advertisers buying through them target audiences on other sites by way of demographic data LinkedIn have collected from their own site.) The announcement was immediately followed by another, this time by MTV, that it too would move into the ad network space.

This is nothing new. This is effectively the step that the world’s largest publishers (Yahoo!, Google and MSN) took months ago. Traditional publishers like Fox have done it too. For these large players, it’s a natural step: if you’ve already got an ad sales force doing a good job of attracting direct advertising, and they’re filling the space on your site – why not get that same sales force to sell those same advertisers’ space on other publishers’ sites, and take a cut?

What has excited us at OpenX a great deal recently, however, is how many smaller OpenX-powered sites have told us they’re taking similar steps.

Niche publishers forming niche networks: what are some OpenX publishers doing?

Many publishers in the OpenX community are smaller sites with very high quality, niche inventory that advertisers typically find hard to reach. These niche sites may have a direct ad sales force team (in some cases a team of one). In many cases, these sites have reached out to other “like-minded” sites with similar content, and either combined their ad sales operations, or one publisher will sell on behalf of the second. There are two key benefits to forming these “niche networks”:

• Scale. Niche publishers often have exactly the kind of audience that advertisers want to reach, but not the scale to attract the big name advertisers that spend the big $s. By combining with other sites, they can build that scale and work their way up the advertising food-chain.
• Cost efficiency. Why pay for two ad sales teams (one at each publisher), when you can get more efficiency out of a single team selling across two sites?

What can OpenX do to help?

At OpenX, we’ve long believed that our publishers don’t get the best possible deal, and by working together more closely as a community, they can do better. For that reason, we’re very excited by these developments. We’re delighted that those publishers that take the above step often use OpenX to serve ads across multiple websites, and find it comfortably scales with them as they expand to selling and sometimes managing inventory on a much broader set of sites. We want to know if there are other simple things we can do, to help our publishers develop in this direction. Would it be helpful if we:

• Provided a “publisher directory” with contact details, so that OpenX publishers could easily identify other “like-minded” publishers?
• Provided website functionality for users to set up “publisher groups”, in which publishers can share best practice and even specific ad-related deals?

What other suggestions do you have?

Do you speak French and like to keep your finger on the technological pulse?

If so, NDFR.net might be just the site for you… it’s a French community web space about all things IT. The content ranges from the latest news stories and articles, through to reviews and tips about software, hardware, games and much more. The site is a great source of information and inspiration, with interactive exchange at its core.

NDFR.net has been using OpenX to serve its ads for three years and Benjamin, Web Master and Founder of NDFR.net, now also employs OpenX technology on a second website, MeilleursPrix.net - a price comparison site.

‘OpenX is great because when you’re a website owner being able to successfully place ads from different advertisers, rotate them, and still be in control is a big concern - it allows me to make more revenue from my websites. OpenX has helped me a great deal over the years and has some excellent features. I use, among others, geotartgeting, frequency capping, campaign prioritization and tracking.’

Our special thanks to Benjamin who has volunteered to translate OpenX into French. He has worked hard to complete the project started by Sébastien and the fruits of their combined efforts are now delivering for the French speaking members of the OpenX community. Merci beaucoup!

Would you like to help with translations? Click here to register.

A common question brought up on the OpenX forum is how to properly track clicks for a Flash banner. We have a tutorial called Using Flash with OpenX which does cover this, but I thought it would be useful to share a quick overview here.

Here are the key points:

• There is a standard for creating Flash banners which can be click tracked. Your Flash banner should use a variable called ‘clickTAG’ described by Adobe in their Flash help document — send this to anyone who creates Flash banners for you.
• The clickTAG variable is case sensitive in new versions of Flash. OpenX does try to rewrite any banners it detects using a variable with different case, but the proper case should be used whenever possible. Remember: clickTAG is good; cLiCkTaG just looks funny.
• If you have a banner which has what we call a ‘hard coded URL’ - then do not fear! A ‘hard coded URL’ means that the banner was coded to go directly to a URL like http://www.openx.org, instead of using the clickTAG variable. OpenX will attempt to rewrite the SWF file so that it instead uses clickTAG. However, keep in mind that having OpenX open your Flash banner and rewrite the code is not a preferable method. It will be a while before machines replace us in the workplace, so for now it is best to use the human method of replacing the URL with clickTAG whenever possible (human method being: use a computer to load a software which loads the Flash banner and lets you type a few characters in order to replace the URL with clickTAG… at least you get to move your fingers a little!).

If you have a Flash banner which isn’t tracking clicks, the first thing to do would be to determine which method (clickTAG or hard-coded) it is using. If you’re not able to communicate with the creator, there are programmes which will let you view the SWF file’s code (explained in tutorial above).

See the full tutorial here: Using Flash with OpenX