A Free Ad Server We Use
Oct 2nd, 2008 | By Kevin | Category: make moneyIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Feedburner. Thanks for visiting!
There are a lot of marketers out there using CPanel hosting for the simplified install of open source scripts like Wordpress and Joomla. However, we don’t here about many using other scripts available in Fantastico. sure we may here about some using Drupal or Mambo, but everyone pretty much sticks to blogs and content management systems.
One of the other scripts that we use and recommend is actually an Ad Server presently called OpenX. It used to be called OpenAds and before that PHPAdsNew. The ad server has really evolved over the last even though this is an open source solution, it truly is an enterprise level ad server capable of serving millions of ads each month. It can also be scaled across multiple servers with the right setup.
You may remeber the big launch of Traffic Fusion last month from Mike Filsaime. The basic premise of Traffic Fusion is to be able to show ads on a partners site while monitoring its activity, and having the ability to change the ad without your partner having to update their site. This is achieved very easily with OpenX much like Hyper Java. You should not that Hyper Java does take it to the next level though, with a simplified insertion code on the partners site and a built in affiliate system accepting payments through Paypal.
OpenX also gives you the ability to GeoTarget your ads as well by the visitors IP address. So if your visitor is from Australia, you can target them with floral shops in Australia instead of the US. This important when promoting affiliate programs specific to different countries.
OpenX also allows you to cap and ad run by clicks or impressions also so you can configure your display advertising specific to your customers need and you can create your own ad network.
The latest relase, 2.6 has added single page calls improving the performance by retrieving multiple ads on a page with a single call to the ad server.
When setting up your ads, you can also associate keywords with the different ads and invoke ads based on keywords from the title or meta tags for a page. We haven’t been using this feature yet but plan to start implementing it on my blog so that the ads that apear within a post are targeted based on what the post is about.
We run a few differnt installations, but a single installation could server ads across a network of websites, giving you all of your ad stats in a single place. It can also be used to serve Adsense ads, allowing you to split test Adsense versus banner advertising or supplement your Adsense income with affiliate income or your own products.
I’ll try to add some overview videos of OpenX next week to take you inside the ad server.
Until next time,
Kevin
Originally from Wisconsin, I moved out to Salt Lake City over ten years ago on a six month software development contract. I now have over 15 years in software development, and was introduced to internet marketing back in 2003. During the wild west days, our business focused on content sites for Adsense revenue. As it became harder and harder to keep up with the search engines, our business has evolved, and forced us to focus on building lists and creating products. We now have a list of about 5000 interested in goal setting, and a small internet marketing list of about 500.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for writing about OpenX and sharing your thoughts. This is a really nice summary of the key features for many publishers like yourself.
cheers,
Oliver George
OpenX Limited