OpenX Blog

We’ve been working on ways for you to maximize your revenue and are excited to release eCPM optimization with OpenX 2.8. eCPM optimization is a free feature that changes delivery and prioritization to make revenue-based serving decisions, making you more money from your campaigns without having to share your profits with a third party.

eCPM prioritization maximizes your revenue by allocating requests to campaigns in proportion to their expected revenues and by spreading risk across different campaigns to adjust for volatile eCPM values. It works across your non-guaranteed CPM, CPC, and CPA campaigns to increase yield on any impression that isn’t allocated to a contract campaign.

When using eCPM optimization along with OpenX Market, you will get the most out of your existing relationships as well as supercede low value campaigns with higher priced offerings from OpenX Market’s direct advertisers, agencies and networks. The two combined form a very powerful yield generation and optimization toolset, using competition instead of daisy-chained guesses to bring you more money for your ad space.

Activating eCPM optimization within OpenX 2.8 is simple, fast and free. To learn more, please click here.

To download OpenX Ad Server 2.8, please click here.

With the recent release of OpenX Ad Server 2.8, a very powerful addition to the product was added with the new plugin architecture. This new framework is a first for our industry: no other ad server offers an extensive plugin architecture. A plugin architecture provides hooks into many of the core engines to allow developers to write code (plugins) that extend or change the functionality of these engines such as targeting, banner types, or delivery. We believe it will really help accomplish our vision of making OpenX Ad Server the advertising foundation for any business serving ads on their web properties by powering innovation in a meaningful new way. To download OpenX Ad Server 2.8, please click here.

We think a few key aspects of the plugin architecture are especially worth noting:

• First, the plugin architecture extends most aspects of the ad server from the targeting engine to the delivery engine to the administrative user interface. This extensibility and flexibility empowers a broad range of innovation that allows you to customize the ad server and streamline your workflow.
• Second, plugins are outside the core application, which allows you to (1) upgrade a particular plugin without needing to upgrade the core or (2) upgrade (or patch) the core code without overwriting modifications made via plugins. Within the ad server, you can automatically check for new updates to a plugin and upgrade it with two clicks. No messy installations!
• Third, unlike changes to the core code that are required to be contributed back as open source to the community by our GPL license, commercial proprietary plugins are not required to be contributed back. Many developers have nontheless already begun to contribute open source plugins.
• Fourth, we’re providing the OpenX Developer Toolbox (Beta) for those who want to get started developing their own plugins. If you’d like to download the latest version, please click here.

There are many plugin efforts already underway. Next month, we are planning to launch a video ad plugin based on IAB’s VAST workflow and compatible with several leading video players. This exciting addition to the ad server will fully utilize the plugin architecture to extend the product in a completely new direction. Many more plugins are also being planned or are already underway and we believe this powerful system will allow our users to take their advertising efforts to the next level. Stay tuned!

Have you been looking for an easier way to earn even higher revenue from your ad space? We want to help you, so we’ve produced a video tutorial of OpenX Market to show you how to achieve this goal. OpenX Market is a new monetization service that provides you with a powerful way to expand your reach to advertisers who’d like to bid directly for your ad impressions. This means more advertisers will get to compete for your ad space, which translates into higher revenues for you, the publisher.

OpenX Market is seamlessly integrated with OpenX Ad Server (both the hosted and the downloadable versions), which means that getting started takes only a few clicks. And it also lets you set a floor price for each campaign’s ads, so OpenX Market will only serve ads if it can beat your specified price.  Maximizing your ad revenue is as easy as that!

Check out the OpenX Market video and start earning more today.

One of the key features that we provide with the OpenX Ad Server is a free GeoIP plugin that can target ads based on a visitor’s country information. For even more precise targeting, such as at the city, postal code or area code level, users can purchase an upgraded GeoIP database package from MaxMind or other vendors.

Now Digital Element, a business unit of Digital Envoy, has developed plugins for OpenX 2.4, 2.6 and the soon-to-be-released 2.8, making it easier than ever before to integrate their industry-leading NetAcuity IP Intelligence technology for improved ad targeting accuracy. NetAcuity allows publishers and ad networks to serve ads based on a comprehensive set of parameters, including country, region/state, DMA, city, US area code, US/Canada postal code, connection speed, and internet service provider.

And through a special arrangement with Digital Element, OpenX users receive discounted pricing when they sign up for the NetAcuity plugin.

For more information about the NetAcuity Technology and the OpenX plugin, please visit Digital Element’s website.

At OpenX, we help web publishers take control of their advertising and maximize ad revenue. As part of our commitment, we’re constantly looking for new ad revenue opportunities to help you make more money.

Based on publisher feedback and interest, we’ve developed the OpenX Ad Network Optimization program. The program is simple - OpenX will manage publisher remnant ad inventory and yield-optimize that inventory across our many ad network partners across the globe, ensuring publishers get the most money from each unit of ad inventory. The benefit to publishers is more revenue and less operational time/expense around managing ad network relationships. All publishers have to do is install a simple OpenX ad tag to get started and let OpenX show you the money!

You might ask, how does this program differ from the many other existing ad network optimization services out there? The simple answer is that OpenX is taking a completely new and unique approach to the problem of how to drive maximum value for ad inventory. Perhaps the most unique aspect of the OpenX optimization approach is that we work with multiple ad networks in combination with our own OpenX Market to get the best price for publisher inventory. This approach to inventory yield optimization combines the OpenX Market ad impression auction with the more traditional method of working with ad networks (where publishers “look back” to review their ad performance from each ad network from the previous day and make changes based old performance data). This hybrid model allows multiple classes of ad buyers (ad networks, agencies and direct advertisers) to bid for OpenX publisher inventory in real time, while also allowing some ad networks to access inventory in a more traditional way. In addition, OpenX will pool inventory from our network of more than 150,000 websites, which will help us drive more scale for ad networks, which should in turn drive higher prices for our publishers.

The bottom line is that we believe this approach will revolutionize how publishers monetize their inventory by creating an open marketplace where publishers can join forces to present their pooled ad inventory to a larger collection of ad buyers, and allow those buyers to access/buy that inventory in multiple ways. The highest price always get the ad inventory.

We’re looking for 100 or so publishers to participate in this beta program, which will launch in early February. Whether your traffic comes primarily from the United States or other parts of the globe, we would love to talk to you about this program. Please contact us for complete program details and to apply.

Hello everyone! Although it is The Holidays, the internet never sleeps. Instead, its more like a gentle snooze on the couch while holiday movies play in the background. This might be a good time to take advantage of the Big Snooze as people like to call it (or they soon will, because everyone follows my lead) and to update your copies of OpenX (or start using OpenX Hosted with the OpenX Market!) and to make sure your site is optimised and using the best invocation tag type for your needs! Yaaaaaay!

The subject for today pertains to the different types of tags you have in OpenX for delivering banners and how they relate to speed. Also included is a worked example of how to invocate your banners at the bottom of your pages and then re-position them once content has loaded.

First, lets try and clear up the types of invocation tags:

Please read the full comparison of invocation tags.

OpenX provides Image, Javascript, iFrame, XML-RPC, Local Mode and Single Page Call invocation tags. There’s choices a-plenty, as you can see. But don’t let this confuse you!

An Image tag is the barebone basic - it requires a cookie and can only deliver image banners (not SWFs or other HTML).

Javascript and iFrame tags are probably the most commonly used and are very versatile. The iFrame tag has the benefit that the content is loaded separately to the rest of the site - so if the banner is slow to load, it won’t delay the rest of the page from loading. However an iFrame tag does not allow for blocking banners or campaigns from displaying more than once per page. Also, because of browser security limitations they can’t be resized dynamically - meaning expandable banners won’t work well here.

Single Page Call is basically the new Javascript tag, available in OpenX versions 2.6 and above. It allows you to place one javascript call in the head of your page, which will call all of your zones or whichever ones you define. Then, you simply mark in your page where you want the zones to be used. Make sure to read the tutorial, and pay special attention to the Named Zones feature. If you don’t name exactly which zones you want to use, it will invocate all zones for the website account being used whether those zones are being displayed or not.

XML-RPC and Local Mode tags are the advanced ones. They request the banner before the page is generated, which gives some interesting possibilities. XML-RPC also allows for greater flexibility with integrating banners in applications other than a standard HTML page, since all banner information is returned in XML. There are tutorials specific to these 2 tags because they are more complicated to implement: documentation index.

So what about speed?

Please keep in mind that there are different ways to define speed.  First off, obviously it is the name of a famous Emmy award-winning film (did it win an Emmy? If not an Emmy, it did win an award… in my heart).

But speed in terms of page loading is not simply defined by the size of the page (10kb versus 3mb) or even the time it takes to load (although both are important). It is largely based on how fast it appears to be. This is influenced by the full size and complete page load time, but if you take 2 pages which are both 88kb and take 88 seconds to load you might find yourself visiting both of them and thinking that websiteB loads much faster than websiteA. This is because websiteB is my website and I’ve built it so that all small-but-important content is allowed to load first, followed by larger-but-important media, followed by banners, and then followed by frivolous animated “Have-a-grrrrrreat-day” GIFs (with neat dancing tigers).

So now lets talk about the banner tags and how they will affect your page speed.

To start, if you are only displaying image banners then the Image tag is a great choice, naturally. And if you just want a single, non-rotating image banner then using a cookieless Image tag with an email zone is a great way to go. These are both very simplistic, but they get the job done for such requirements.

If your website is on the same server and domain as OpenX, and the website can execute PHP code, then using Local Mode is quite a speedy option as it simply requires including a PHP file and then calling a function to request the banner.

If you want your banners to load separately from your website, then using iFrame tags is recommended. However, remember that to some people iFrame tags may *look* slower simply because the rest of the page will load separately.

And finally, javascript gives a good combination of versatility and features. Single Page Call allows you to take advantage of this and adds a speedy delivery.

But wait - there’s more. You could place banners at the bottom of your HTML page (after all content) and then use javascript to reposition the banners. What this does is give the rest of the content higher priority and it will have a better chance of being loaded first.

To help with this, please see this worked example for End of Page delivery: eop-example.

Inside the zip file is an HTML page with 2 spots for banners, as well as some fascinating content. At the bottom of the page are 2 invocation tags as well as a call to a javascript function which will reposition the 2 banners to appear above where they are meant to. The javascript file can most likely be kept as-is.

What other things can you do to help speed?

Caching is important. OpenX has built-in caching which limits calls to the database - in a production environment you might want to increase the cache time used by your installation. You might also want to install a caching system for PHP on your server.

Keep in mind what 3rd parties you are using for banners. If you are using external image banners or 3rd party HTML banners, not only must OpenX deliver the banner but the 3rd party must then deliver the image/HTML. Sometimes such external sources can be slow to load and should be kept in mind when analyzing speed.

Also, using additional features will have a slight impact on speed, try not to use unnecessary targeting/delivery features for absolute best performance.

Well, it’s been a blast! (no pun intended… Get it? Speed.. movie with a bomb… a blast? Ok, so the pun was intended, it just wasn’t very good). Make sure to check out the previous Tips and Tricks and also let us know what tips you have for speedy-page-loading.

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!

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

I can’t resist… the impulse is too strong… I click on banners which advertise movies featuring caped crusaders and fast cars. I know this because it’s in my nature, but how do you, the publisher, decide that you should show me ads about action movies rather than financial services?

You could try channelling the essence of Arlen but it’s not easy. Firstly you’ll have to buy a slick fannie pack. Then get some sweet Canadian rock tunes playing repeatedly in your head. And third… well actually that’s pretty much it, I don’t lead a complicated life.

But if you are without Canadian rock or fannie packs have no fear, banner targeting is here!

Luckily for you I am a registered member of your website and have provided you with a steady stream of useful information: age, gender, location, interests, address, marital status, # of children, favorite brand of maple syrup, and the like.

We have covered in other areas of documentation and tutorials different methods of targeting banners. Right now I’d like to go over the site variable method which is new in version 2.6. It is very similar to the source targeting option however it is much more versatile as you are able to define your own variable names and use as many as you like.

As the source targeting guide is very well written by community consultant Erik Geurts, I would highly suggest reading it first. The difference here is that on the delivery limitations page of a banner you will want to use the site->variable option rather than site->source.

Once you have chosen this option, you will want to provide a variable name and a value for this variable. Let’s use ‘gender’ as the variable name and ‘male’ as the value, and leave the equation option as ‘is equal to’.

Now the banner (or channel) which you assigned this limitation to will only display when the invocation tag tells OpenX that the ‘gender’ variable equals ‘male’. After you have placed an invocation tag on your website you will need to add some coding which adds a name of a variable to the tag and the value of said variable. This will require some coding knowledge and will change depending on how your site is built. I will give an example using basic PHP using a JavaScript invocation tag from OpenX.

I won’t post the whole JavaScript tag, but in the middle you will see lines similar to:
document.write ("<scr"+"ipt type='text/javascript' src='"+m3_u);
document.write ("?zoneid=5");
document.write ('&amp;cb=' + m3_r);
What you want is a line after the zoneid which adds a variable and value, like:
document.write ("<scr"+"ipt type='text/javascript' src='"+m3_u);
document.write ("?zoneid=5");
document.write (’&amp;gender=<?php echo $user['gender']; ?>’);
document.write (’&amp;cb=’ + m3_r);

What this will look like when rendered by the website would be ‘ajs.php?zoneid=5&gender=male’. The actual code will of course change depending on your website and how you store user data.

This is just the tip of the melting iceberg, but hopefully it helps many of you get started with this new feature. We will be adding an advanced tutorial which shows in more depth how to use the feature and how to append variables and values to different invocation tags. Basically - you want to add the variable after the main delivery file name. So for iframe it would be ‘afr.php?zoneid=5&amp;gender=male’. Single page call would have ’spcjs.php?id=1&amp;gender=male’.

So now that you know the user is male, you can focus on banners with subjects males most likely are interested in (like football and football - by the way geotargeting is also useful). Sure I once clicked on a banner for High School the Musical but that is an exception, not the rule (but it does exceptionally rule!).

As an example of how far this targeting can go, let’s say you add ‘favoriteFood’, ‘favoriteBand’, and ‘favoriteActionHero’ to the invocation tag - when I view a page, I might see a banner something like this. Definite click!

It’d be great if you can provide examples of how to code such basic additions to the invocation tag using your favorite programming language, CMS or templating system. Five stars and a smiley emoticon go to whomever points out a way to automatically grab page meta keywords, page title, and other such keywords and auto-add them to an invocation tag for a method of content-relative targeting.

Search advertising is very mature - there is a well structured data model for advertisers to use. Interestingly, display advertising still does not have a structured model for using the data exposed from websites - it is still a largely fragmented market. This needs to change in order for websites - especially small and medium sized websites - to make more money from online advertising.

When an advertiser buys ads based on no data (e.g. ‘blind’), this means that the advertiser has no clue of the following things:

• What time of day (or how evenly distributed) the impressions will occur
• Which websites will display the ads
• What types of users will be viewing the ads

If data is provided to the advertiser, (e.g. the ads will display during the day on Digg for tech focused males), the price advertisers pay can increase up to 10x or more for the same ads.

That is a big price difference!

The more data transparency that advertisers have about the site, users, and timeframe, the less risk they associate with the purchase, and therefore the price advertisers are willing to pay increases. In addition, organizing data into simple straightforward structures that advertisers understand will again increase revenues.

The process of exposing and organizing website data is called ‘expression’. There are a number of types of expression that can be done by website publishers:

Content Expression
There are a number of parameters that can be exposed about website content. For example, letting advertisers know the URL of the page gives amazing insight into the type of user and their frame of mind when viewing advertising. Furthermore, packaging a website in terms of category, keyword, expertise level, etc., will give advertisers a strong sense of what types of users they are reaching.

Demographic Expression
Demographic expression refers to attributes about the user viewing the website. The easiest data to gather is the country, city, time zone, etc., where the user is located (OpenX uses geo plugins to provide this information). If a website stores other demographic information about users, such as age and income bracket, gender, etc., this is also extremely useful to advertisers.

Behavior Expression
By ‘remembering’ the way users behaved in the past, valuable insight can be provided to advertisers. For example, if a user looked at a VW Jetta the last time she was at an automobile site, this information can be valuably shared with an auto advertiser on the next visit - even when the viewer is browsing other, less lucrative pages on the site. In addition, a user’s behavior on multiple sites can be stored - providing even more value to advertisers.

Beyond the expression of site data, there are a few things that a website must also consider:

Privacy
It is very important to be completely straightforward with website users about how their information is used. This includes providing a simple, easy to read privacy policy that details what information is provided to advertisers, and in what form (non-personally identifiable information, aggregate information, etc.)

Organization
One of the most important considerations before undergoing site expression is how expression is organized. Some large websites (like the Comscore 100) can get away with expressing their site however they wish - because there is so much inventory, advertisers will take the time to understand unique attributes of the site. Small or medium sized websites do not have that luxury.

How Can OpenX Help?

• Introduce Standards - making similar ways of expressing inventory for all websites will make it easier for agencies to buy inventory at higher CPM’s.
• Data Services - by allowing publishers to pass user data to advertisers (if they wish), advertisers will know more about the people viewing the website, thus making the website more attractive to advertisers.
• CMS Integration - OpenX is working on integrating inside content management systems and blogs in a seamless way, so that inventory and data can be expressed by default.

These services will be a first step in our mission of increasing transparency and getting an increased, fair market value for advertising in the OpenX publisher community.