You Should be Using Openads

• Posted by B Jones on October 15th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

Hopefully, most of you are running some sort of advertising on your sites. Hopefully at the least, you’ve tried the easiest ways to monetize your sites that I promote on the right side of the page: Google Adsense, and or Text-Link-Ads.

As your site grows, and as you start to realize your site’s earning potential, you’ll find that your may be limiting yourself by only using programs like AdSense. It’s not that Adsense is bad, it’s really great, but there comes a time when you need to expand into selling other kinds of ads. and even start selling space directly to advertisers.

When I came to that realization, I decided to put a little “Advertise Here” banner on the right column of the site, and got several inquiries. I came up with several pricing options, depending on size and the length of time the advertiser wanted to show the ad. I didn’t really have any way to manage the ads, and that was my first mistake.

The first method I used was to just put the ads up, and mark the dates on my calendar when I should remove them. More than a month went by, when I realized that I should have removed one of the ads more than a week earlier. I realized that for someone like me, the calendar method wasn’t going to cut it. The quickest thing I could think to do was to just wrap the ads in a little PHP script that would automatically stop showing the ads after their period was over. This method worked, but that was about all it did. Advertising became something that was out of site and out of mind, and just sort of got swept under the carpet, and when it comes to making money, that is definitely not the way to do it.

Enter Openads
I was still getting requests from advertisers, but was frustrated with my ineffective ad management system, so I decided to try something else. I had heard of an ad management program called phpAdsNew a while back, and after a bit of searching, I found that phpAdsNew was now OpenAds, and had undergone a major upgrade.

Installation and configuration was pretty straight forward. Not much worse than installing wordpress or a similar web app. I logged into my new admin account, and started to dig around. After a bit of trial and error, I was able to get my first ads up and running. (see How-To Get Started below)

Benefits of Using OpenAds
There are way too many benefits to list, but I’ll share some of the features I’m using.

• Tracking Ad Stats, Including Click-Thru-Rates (CTR)
  I can now test the effectiveness of different ads on my sites to see which perform best. It’s a lot like using Google AdSense Channels, but even better, because you can pick what kinds of ads to show.
• Great for Managing Affiliate Ads and CPA ads
  If you use ads from networks like Comission Junction or CPAEmpire.com, OpenAds is pretty much a necessity. I was able to find the ads that perform the best by just picking several ads that I thought might be good, and running them for a week or so, then removing out those that didn’t perform
• Dealing with Advertisers
  With OpenAds, I just enter an advertisers info, create a campaign, set the time span and forget about it. When the ad is about to expire, OpenAds will send the advertiser a reminder to renew, which is just great.
• OpenAds Sends Traffic Reports
  OpenAds sends weekly reports to advertisers, detailing the number of page views, clicks and CTR for each their ad.
• Checking up on AdSense
  Now when Google, or some other company tells me I had 10,000 page views, and only 5 clicks, I can verify that. (Yes, you can run AdSense and track AdSense clicks via OpenAds)

• Tartget your Ads
  Ability to target ads by: Browser, Domain, IP Address, Language, Operating System, Useragent, US Area Code, City, Continent, Country, DMA, Netspeed, ISP/Organisation, US/Canada Post Code, Region, Referring Page, Source, Date, Day of Week, Hour of Day, Longitude/Latitude, Channel, Homepage, Page URL, Variable
• Sell CPM Ads
  You have the option to cap your ads after a certain amount of pageviews, so if you wanted to, you could price ads as something like, $1/1000 views.
• Conversion Tracking
  Give priority to your best performing ads.

A Brief How-To Get Started
I decided to test things out using myself as an advertiser. I created a banner for one of my sites, (myIPneighbors.com) for this purpose. If you can, I recommend that you do the same to get started. If you don’t have another site to test on, feel free to use mine

1. Create an Advertiser
Go to the “Inventory” tab, and click the “Add new advertiser” link. Follow the prompts, and enter all of the information for the advertiser, including email and name. This is important, because OpenAds will send emails using this info.

Keep following the prompts, and you’ll end up create a new “Campaign” for the advertiser, and finally you’ll add the first banner. For the Banner Type, choose “Local banner (SQL)”, and upload your banner.

2. Create a new Publisher and Zone
Click the “Publishers & Zones” tab, and click the “Add new publisher” link. You’ll need to fill out the info for the publisher, which will be your info again.

Next “Create a zone” for your publisher. This is basically an area of a specified size where ads will appear.

Once you make your new Zone, you’ll need to link the zone to the banner you created earlier. Once linked, banners will appear in that zone.

Next you need to publish the new zone on your website. Under the Invocationcode tab, you can Generate invocation code. This generates the dynamic javascript code to display your ads. It works lot like Adsense javascript, in that you paste the code, and it can display whatever ads you send to it.

Download OpenAds
As the name suggests, OpenAds is completely free.
You can get it at OpenAds.org.