OpenX Tips

Really important news for OpenX Hosted users, as OpenX today announce an update made to OpenX Hosted last week that potentially impacts user’s specifically set banner delivery weights.

As you know, campaign and banner weights are an important part of the OpenX delivery process, as they define how often different campaigns and banners will be displayed in relation to other campaigns and banners.

In this announcement in the OpenX forums, OpenX have announced that when a campaign has all banners set with the default weight of 1, instead of delivering all of the banners in the campaign an approximately equal number of times, OpenX Hosted will now automatically decide how many times each banner should be delivered.

This is great news, if you want this type of functionality — the ability to let OpenX decide which banners should be delivered to optimize performance of your campaigns is a long awaited feature. However, all OpenX Hosted users should be aware that this change would appear to have gone live, and will affect anyone who has set up their campaigns with all banners having the default weights of 1, even if you don’t actually want this feature enabled, and you would prefer that all of your banners in a campaign are delivered an equal number of times.

You can see The Guru’s follow up thread to OpenX on the forums, where, hopefully, the OpenX team will follow up on this change in default behavior…

Today’s tip comes courtesy of Seagull Systems’ Demian Turner, who quite rightly points out:

“During testing you can set the cache timeout value to some low value like 1 second so that effectively the cache doesn’t get used.”

If you’re debugging banner delivery, or you want to test the results of changing settings like banner capping or companion positioning, then reducing the banner cache value can be a great way of seeing your changes “go live” much faster.

Of course, if you’re doing this on a production system, you may affect delivery performance, so make sure you keep an eye on your system performance monitoring tool!

If you have more than one banner on a website page, it’s easy to ensure that you never show the same banner twice with the OpenX ad server.

Provided you are using Single Page Call, or the Javascript zone tag, the Local Mode zone tag or the XML-RPC zone tag, then under Tag Settings on the Invocation Code tab, you can set the “Don’t show the banner again on the same page” option, and OpenX will ensure that the same banner is not shown more than once on a page.

The "Don't show the banner again on the same page" option.

There is also the “Don’t show a banner from the same campaign again on the same page” option for Single Page Call and these three zone tags, which can be used to ensure that every banner on a page will be from a different campaign.

Of course, you can use both options if you want to ensure that not only is every banner on a page from a different campaign, but also that there are no duplicate banners.

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. [↩]

What is companion positioning? The OpenX 2.8 user guide only mentions the topic very briefly, so it’s worth a deeper look.

Companion positioning is a way of ensuring that when one banner on a page is from a campaign, then all banners on the page will be from the same campaign. So, for example, imagine your web site has two zones on every page, and an advertiser says to you that they would like to advertise on your site, but only if they can have their banners in the two zones show up at the same time. This is when you want to use companion positioning.

Setting up companion positioning

Setting up companion positioning in OpenX is very simple. When you have an advertiser that wants a campaign with companion positioning, all you have to do is enable the “Companion positioning” option under “Miscellaneous” on the campaign property screen.

Enabling companion positioning for a campaign.

Effect of companion positioning

Consider the following example, where there are two advertisers, each with one campaign:

Advertiser 1, Standard Campaign:

• Banner 1: Linked to Zone 1
• Banner 2: Linked to Zone 1
• Banner 3: Linked to Zone 2
• Banner 4: Linked to Zone 2

Advertiser 2, Companion Campaign:

• Banner 1: Linked to Zone 1
• Banner 2: Linked to Zone 2

As you would expect, when the two zones are placed on a single page, there are five different possible outcomes — four different combinations of Advertiser 1′s campaign banners can be displayed, and one combination of Advertiser 2′s campaign banners. That is, as Advertiser 2′s campaign is set to be a companion position, it’s banners never show up with any other banners other than its own.

To see the above example in action, see the Tip #29 example page, which you can reload over and over to see how companion positioning ensures that the two companion banners only ever show together on a page.

Caveats

There are a number of caveats to be aware of when using companion positioning:

• When OpenX delivers one banner from a companion campaign, then all of the other zones on the page must have banners from the companion campaign. If any of the other zones on the page do not have a banner from that campaign that can be delivered (e.g. there is no banner from the campaign linked to the zone, or the banner has delivery limitations or capping applied that prevent the banner from being delivered), then no banner will be displayed in the zone¹. You should ensure that your companion campaigns have banners linked to all zones that will appear on your page, and that all banners in companion campaigns have identical capping and delivery limitations!
• The whole point of companion positioning is to display multiple banners from the same campaign on the same page. If you want to run companion campaigns, remember that you must not have your zones configured with the “Don’t show a banner from the same campaign again on the same page” option!
• Older versions of OpenX had a bug in companion campaign delivery, which meant that if the first banner on a page was from a non-companion campaign, subsequent banners could still be from a companion campaign, resulting in a mixed non-companion/companion banner situation. You should upgrade OpenX to the latest stable release to avoid this issue.
• Companion positioning will not work with the iframe, Image and No Cookie Image zone tag types. Obviously, companion positioning will also not work with the Popup zone tag type, as this opens a new window, which contains just the one zone.
• If you are using the OpenX Market, it would make sense to not enable the Market for your companion campaigns. As your advertiser is paying to specifically have their ads displayed in all of your zones on a page at once, it does not make sense allow any of those banners be overridden by an OpenX Market banner!

1. Note: This appears to be set to change in OpenX 2.8.2, so that if no banner from the companion campaign is linked to a zone, then a normal banner will be delivered. See issue OX-5508 [↩]