OpenX Blog

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.

Using a PHP accelerator can greatly improve the performance of your PHP applications and the OpenX ad server is no exception. Installing a PHP accelerator is likely to improve OpenX performance more than any other single tuning technique.

We recently heard from Xuk, an OpenX publisher, who serves around 210 million impressions a month. Xuk’s ad server was showing signs of heavy load. As a result he decided to try installing an open source PHP accelerator and was kind enough to post some performance benchmarks of his ad server before and after installing a PHP accelerator.

As you can see from Xuk results, adding the PHP accelerator made a big difference. Requests per second are up from 28 per second to 88 per second whilst the system load is down 3.6 to 2.0. In our experience, Xuk’s results are pretty typical. We recommend OpenX publishers use a PHP accelerator to ensure they are getting the most out their existing hardware.

Thanks Xuk, this is a good reminder for OpenX publishers everywhere.

What’s your experience?
Have you experimented with using a PHP accelerator? Did you see similar results? Which PHP accelerator would you recommend and what performance gains would you expect?

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Related links:

• PHP Cache website
• eAccelerator website
• Key Performance Tuning Techniques for OpenX

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 OpenX (previously Openads) blog. Erik has prepared a detailed how-to about implementing targeting using source parameters in OpenX. This follows on nicely from another guest blog article, Effective ad management using OpenX 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 – OpenX 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 OpenX 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 OpenX to implement source parameter targeting in a way which makes managing targeting easy and reliable.

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

To everyone else in the OpenX 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.

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

First, login to the demo ad server here:
http://www.openx.org/products/demo

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 OpenX 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 OpenX 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 OpenX 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.

Update:
Sept 2008: I’ve updated links to the new OpenX website and demo ad server.

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

Thanks to everyone who took the time to speak with us at the Affiliate Summit in London. We really enjoyed having the opportunity to talk to with so many affiliates. We’d also like to send out a special thanks to Shawn Collins from the Affiliate Marketing Blog for inviting us to attend.

There were a few questions which came up frequently and we thought it might be useful to answer some of them here.

Is Openads an ad network?
No, we are not an ad network but we understand the confusion. Openads is software which you can use to manage advertising from many sources on your websites.

Can I target my ads to specific pages/sections within my site?
Of course! Openads has many different targeting capabilities; Page URL targeting is just one many of the targeting options available.

Can Openads manage advertising for many websites at once?
Yes, it’s a pretty common thing to do. You will probably want to define many publishers and use one for each of your websites.

Can I manage CPA campaigns using Openads?
Yes, affiliates often want to run CPA campaigns with partners who don’t have a way of tracking referrals and conversions. Using conversion tracking you can track visitor referrals through to conversions for reporting and invoicing.

Scaling phpAdsNew was really hard!
Not any more, we’ve introduced a feature called distributed statistics in Openads 2.4 which makes it much easier to share the ad serving load across many servers efficiently.

Can Openads provide Forecasting/Availability?
Not at the moment, viewing historical delivery by zone is a good alternative but forecasting and availability features are in the pipeline! Stay tuned.

Can Openads do X?
If it can’t yet – you could add it yourself. Openads is an open-source application, you are welcome to modify the source code and add the feature you want. If you’ve made any improvements to our code, please get in touch – perhaps we can incorporate it into the core product.

Got a question about Openads? Ask away, we’d love to hear from you.

Direct ad space sales bring in some of the highest revenues but also require the greatest effort to arrange. In Scott’s recent interview, Jeremy from Shoemoney describes how he sells ad space on his blog using a fixed price monthly tenancy rather than using CPM, CPC or CPA rates.

Have your say… What’s the best way to do direct sales? What factors affects your choice?

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Update, the results are in:

Q: When you sell ad space on your site directly to advertisers, how do you sell it?