OpenX Tips

Here’s a great question from the OpenX Forums about companion positioning:

“I have 4 zones… I only want to show banners from the same campaign for Zones 1 and 2. I don’t want to run an ad more than once on the same page.”

If you read last week’s post on companion positioning, then you will know that OpenX was not designed to do this — either you show banners from a companion campaign on all banners on the page, or you don’t. It’s not really built to run a companion campaign in some of the zones, but not in others.

However, you can subvert OpenX to do “partial” companion position, if you really need to. Well, to a limited extent, anyway. There are two different ways:

Put your non-companion zones first

If you can, you can put your zones that don’t have companion campaign banners in them first on the page. OpenX will happily select banners from any campaign as it goes along, until it gets to a zone where it selects a companion campaign banner. From that point on, all banners will have to be in the companion campaign¹.

Use mixed zone tag types

The iframe, Image and No Cookie Image tag types do not support companion positioning. So, you can set up your companion campaigns to be delivered by zone tags that do support this option (the JavaScript zone tag, for example), while your other zones are delivered by a zone tag type that does not support companion campaigns (say, the iframe zone tag).

Unfortunately, this does mean that other options, like not showing banners twice, or not showing banners from the same campaign again for the non-companion campaign banners will not be available.

1. Note that this trick does not work when using Single Page Call. [↩]