OpenX Tips

If you are using the OpenX ad server to display banners on your website, then you are almost certainly also interested in viewing the details of the users who visit your website.

To obtain this information, some people use third party services like Google Analytics, which collects data via a tag that is inserted into a website’s pages. Other people download and install Piwik, which also uses a tag inserted into a website’s pages. However, many people still use older tools like AWStats or Webalizer to analyze their web server log files instead.

If you are using a web server log analyzer, then you should keep in mind that the calls to OpenX to request, display and log banners will probably end up being added to your web server log file¹. As a result, if you are using a tool like AWStats or Webalizer, you should consider updating the configuration of the log file analyzer to ignore, or otherwise separate out, the OpenX ad server log entries, otherwise your page hit information in these tools will be greatly over-stated.

1. This will depend on exactly how OpenX is installed, and how your web server logging has been configured [↩]