You are here: Home / Archives for Erik Geurts

Benefits of OpenX Single Page Call for maximum site speed

May 11, 2011 By

Open Ad Server software has had a powerful feature called “Single Page Call” for several years. Unfortunately, there has not been a lot of attention for it, which is a shame because there are many advantages for site owners, ad server administrators and most importantly site visitors.

In this article, I will explain the benefits of using the Single Page Call tags in your site, leading up to more articles that will have detailed instructions on how to switch from traditional invocation code to the advanced single page call technique.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Website Integration Tagged With: , , ,

How to: Test an ad on the site without visitors seeing it

April 13, 2011 By

Testing banners before you show them to site visitorsI received an e-mail from Mark, with this question:

We would like to be able to test new banners in OpenX and see them on the website to make sure that they work. That would enable us to verify that the ads (often Flash ads) do not interfere with other flash content on the pages. However, until we have completed our checks, we don’t want the visitors of the site to see them yet. Is there a way to do this?

Here is the reply I sent to Mark:

This is not at all difficult, it involves making use of the targeting feature in OpenX to ensure the ad will only be visible to you. There are actually multiple ways to do this, including:
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Ad management Tagged With: , ,

How to: Target ads to a specific browser

March 22, 2011 By

Google Chrome logoA client asked me how he can target an ad so that it will only be displayed when the site visitor is using a specific browser, in this case Google Chrome. He wants to show a special ad for that situation.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Ad management, Targeting Tagged With: , ,

Fix for Contract Campaign Under Delivery Problem (Part 2)

March 7, 2011 By

In December 2009, I wrote a blog post about a fix for the contract campaign under delivery problems that many people experienced at the time. Back then, OpenX version 2.8.2 was the most recent release. The fix didn’t make it into OpenX v2.8.3 security fix version that was released just before Christmas 2009, but it was incorporated in all later releases.

The developer who created this fix, Matteo Beccati, continued working on the issues that many people reported with contract campaigns that wouldn’t get the required number of impressions, even when there was more than enough traffic available.

A second fix, a follow up to the earlier fix, has been released in June 2010, but I never got around to mentioning it here on the site. The bug report and fix can be downloaded from the OpenX developer zone.

Update March 10, 2011: I’ve had the opportunity to test this second part of the fix in a real-life situation for one of my clients. There was a contract campaign that was seriously under delivering, doing only about 11,000 impressions per day where it needed at least 15,000 per day to reach its target by the end date. After the patch was implemented, the probability percentages of the campaign’s banners in the zones it was linked to immediately increased and the campaign has started to compensate for the lower impression numbers before. It looks very plausible that it will reach its target at the end of the duration.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: ,

Can OpenX do geotargeting?

January 18, 2011 By

Geotargeting: show a banner to visitors from a specific country or city only

One of the more common questions I receive is: Can OpenX do geotargeting?

The short version of the answer is: Yes. For the more complete answer, first I’ll describe what geotargeting is and then I’ll explain how to enable and use geotargeting.

What is geotargeting?

Geotargeting is a technique that uses the IP address of the computer used by a visitor of your site to look up the geographic location of that visitor. This location can then be used to target ads. This means you can instruct your OpenX ad server to display an ad only to US visitors, for example, or to everyone except visitors from the US and Canada. So the word geotargeting is a combination of geographic and targeting.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Ad management, Configuration, Targeting Tagged With: ,

How to: Choosing a smart location for an OpenX installation

January 6, 2011 By

Another entry in my new Q & A section, and this time it’s a question I’ve received numerous times in the past:

I’m planning to install OpenX. I’m starting small, but I want to be ready for the future growth that I’m hoping for. What’s your advise for choosing a location for the installation of my ad server?

This is a very good question, because making the right choices now will save you a lot of time, energy and trouble later.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Installation Tagged With: , ,

Can OpenX do conversion tracking?

December 23, 2010 By

When a site visitor buys a product or service, this is called a 'conversion'.

I often get questions in the mail or through the contact form that might be relevant to more than just one person. That’s why I have decided to start answering these questions on this blog. I’ve created a new Q&A category, I hope to be able to add more posts shortly.

A visitor of the site, Michael, sent me the following question:

Is OpenX capable of conversion tracking at the banner level, and determine the eCPM of each individual banner?

My reply to Michael was:
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Inventory Management, Statistics Tagged With: ,

How to: Dynamically insert an affiliate ID into a banner

December 21, 2010 By

I often get questions in the mail or through the contact form that might be relevant to more than just one person. That’s why I have decided to start answering these questions on this blog. I’ve created a new Q&A category, I hope to be able to add more posts shortly.

Lorand Minyo from Romania sent me this question:

I have a campaign running on multiple sites with different publishers, with two banners in rotation. These publishers run the invocation code on their sites and I use OpenX to count views and clicks. However, I’d like to give each of the publishers the ability to have a different link for the same banner – for example publisher 1 using banner X and have the link myurl.com?affid=1, publisher 2 using the same banner X and have the link myurl.com?affid=2 and so on. This would be particularly useful, since I want to count views and clicks in OpenX and record transactions in my billing system. So my question is: Can you have different links for the same banner or different links for different zones?

Lorand, this is possible, and it is not even all that hard to implement. I suggest we use two techniques that are not very well known: site variables in zone invocation code and magic macros in banners. I will explain below.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Inventory Management, Website Integration Tagged With: , ,

What happened to OpenX 3.0?

December 17, 2010 By

One year ago, on December 16, 2009, I met with OpenX CTO John Linden and OpenX Vice President of Enterprise Sales Mike Downey, during their stay in The Netherlands. They were visiting several countries and companies in Europe that week and I had the opportunity to sit down with them in a cafe in the center of Amsterdam for almost 2 hours.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: General, News, OpenX Community Hosted, OpenX Enterprise Hosted Tagged With: ,

The real costs of OpenX Enterprise

December 14, 2010 By

A few weeks ago, a post on the OpenX blog announced the availability of a marketing white paper on “The Real Cost of Hosting an Ad Server“. This marketing paper aims to provide a comparison of the costs of owning and operating a self-hosted OpenX installation, the costs of self-hosting a copy of DART Enterprise and the costs of using a hosted account at OpenX Enterprise.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: OpenX Enterprise Hosted Tagged With:
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »