OpenX Tips

The OpenX ad server offers a lot of flexibility — which is exactly what you want from a full featured ad management solution.

However, as with many things in life, with flexibility comes complexity. That means that as your website grows, and you start to need to manage more and more advertisers, or, if you’re running an OpenX installation that looks after more then one website, it can become very easy to get yourself tied up in knots when trafficking in the OpenX ad server, if you’re not careful!

To avoid getting yourself lost in a maze of trafficking management inside OpenX, one of the best things you can do is to use a naming convention for all of your OpenX entities.

While a “naming convention” sounds complicated, it doesn’t have to be. All that it means is that you (and your trafficking team, if you’re lucky enough to manage an OpenX installation large enough to need one), need to come up with a system for naming your advertisers, campaigns, banners, trackers, channels, websites and zones that means that, no matter what page you are looking at inside OpenX, you don’t have to think twice about what it is you are looking at.

Exactly how you do this will depend on how you (and your team) use OpenX. To give you some ideas, The Guru has seen all of the following used to great effect:

Client Codes

• Use codes to identify your clients (i.e. your advertisers, perhaps also your websites, depending on how you are using OpenX). A short, simple code is all it takes. For example, if you have an advertiser called Green’s Fantastic Veggies, then “GFV” might be a simple, easy to use code.
• Use these codes throughout OpenX. By including the client code in all entities (e.g. by putting “GFV” at the start of the name of all campaigns and banners that Green’s Fantastic Veggies run), then you’ll never have any confusion about who’s campaign or banner you are looking at, no matter which screen you’re viewing. This is especially helpful when looking at entities from the “reverse” point of view — for example, when viewing all of the banners linked to a zone, when only the banner names (normally from a number of different campaigns and advertisers) are visible.
• If you have any external systems for managing the contracts you have with clients, try and align your identification codes in these systems with those in OpenX.

Campaign Information

• Include information about how campaigns are set up to run in the campaign name. When looking at the statistics screens in OpenX, it is often very useful to be able to quickly identify the main points of how a campaign should be delivering without having to review the campaign configuration. For example, you could include:
  • Details of the type of campaign  — e.g. “EXC” for exclusive campaigns, “CON” for contract campaigns and “REM” for remnant campaigns;
  • The start and end dates of the campaign, if it has them;
  • Details of any campaign lifetime delivery targets;
  • Details of any daily delivery targets.

Zone Position or Purpose

• Include something meaningful about the position or purpose of a zone in the zone name. Perhaps you use OpenX in a way where you have separate zones for separate parts of a website — the main site section, the sports section, the news section, etc. — so, make sure that you clearly name which zone appears where.

Size Information

• Including the size of banners or zones in the name isn’t really necessary, as OpenX will always make sure that you don’t link banners and zones that are of different sizes. However, there’s nothing wrong with including this information, as it can help with tracking down exactly where banners are being delivered quickly and easily.

Obviously, there is an almost infinite scope for how you can name your OpenX entities. Ensuring that you have a consistent, easy to understand naming convention that suits the way you use the ad server will go a very long way to helping you get the most out of OpenX, by keeping things clean, clear and easy to understand — and in the log run, this will help you save time, and make more money.