OpenX Tips

You’re a publisher. You have ads on your website. You do this because you want to make money as compensation for all those long, hard hours you put into your site. The OpenX ad server helps you to do that. Great!

However, as your website grows and becomes more and more popular (and has more and more traffic), you may start to think about how you can make more money from your ads. As a first stop, you’ve experimented with different ad networks, and that’s helped. But eventually, you’re likely to start thinking about direct sales, because you can see that if you can forge relationships with advertisers directly — advertisers that want to reach your website’s audience — then there’s money to be made.

The first step, of course, is to learn all you can about direct sales practices, and maybe even consider re-targeting as a means of getting advertisers to spend their money with you.

However, the reality of online advertising is that while you want to earn more money, advertisers want to spend less money. So, how can you convince advertisers to spend more?

One way is to let advertisers run CPA campaigns.

As you probably know, there are four main ways that advertisers buy advertising on sites:

• Tenancy: Advertisers pay a fixed price to have their ad(s) appear in a given place on your site for a given period (e.g. one month);
• CPM: Cost per thousand impressions: Advertisers pay a fixed price per thousand ad impressions;
• CPC: Cost per click: Advertisers pay a fixed price per click on an ad; and
• CPA: Cost per action (or cost per acquisition): Advertisers pay a fixed price per “action” — that is, once a user sees and clicks on your ad, if they then go and make a purchase, for example, then the advertiser will pay.

As you can imagine, there’s a risk with running a CPA campaign — you might deliver thousands upon thousands of ad impressions, and if none of your users end up making a purchase from the advertiser, then you don’t get paid. However, as you can imagine, there’s an upside too. As CPA campaigns deliver actual, quantifiable benefits to an advertiser, they are willing to pay a lot more per action, compared with what they are willing to pay per click or pay per thousand impressions. It’s not unheard of to have CPA campaigns that pay, quite literally, hundreds of dollars per action¹.

If you can forge a direct relationship with an advertiser that really matches your website user base, and you use appropriate capping of your CPA campaigns (to make sure that you don’t show the same campaign over and over and over to a user who is clearly not interested in the ad), then you can stand to dramatically increase your site revenue.

Sounds good, right? But how do you actually set up a CPA campaign in OpenX?

Luckily, OpenX have published an excellent tutorial on how to set up CPA campaigns — so, now you are all set! Get those CPA campaigns rolling!

1. Yes, really. No, not hundreds of dollars per thousand actions; hundreds of dollars per action. You will need to have the right website, the right target audience, and the right advertiser align perfectly, though, before this will happen. Still, even if all CPA campaigns aren’t this lucrative, it’s still possible to make a lot more from CPA campaigns than CPC and CPM, when done right. [↩]