OpenX Tips

Greg Rickaby has a great post up showing how to create banners with delivery limitations on his site. Go check it out if you want to see a real-live demo of how to perform site segmentation using delivery limitations!

In OpenX, it is possible to apply capping to banners. Capping allows you to set a maximum number of times a banner will be seen by a user. This limitation can apply:

• For the browser session — that is, the limitation on the number of times a user will see the banner will apply until the user closes their web browser, at which time the capping limitation count will be re-set; or
• For all time — that is, once the user has seen the banner the number of times specified by the limitation cap, they will not see the banner again, even if they close and restart their browser.

With either type of capping, you can specify an optional time period. After this time period, the cap will be re-set, and the user will once again be able to see the banner, until the cap is reached again.

In addition to setting capping at the banner level, capping can also be applied at the campaign level. In this case, the capping is applied to the aggregate impressions for all banners in the campaign, and once the limit is reached, no banners from the campaign will be shown.

As an example, consider the banner shown below. It has been set up with a capping level of 2 impressions for all time, with a capping re-set period of 24 hours. You have already seen the banner once now, so, if you reload this page, you will see the banner for a second time — which is the limit. Should you re-load the page a second time, you will not see the banner, as you have already reached the limit of two impressions. (But if you come back tomorrow, the banner will once again show for another two impressions.)

The delivery capping options set for the above example banner.

With regards to the above example banner, no guaranteed delivery banner has been included in the zone being displayed, which is why no banner appears once you have reached the 2 impression limit per 24 hours. This highlights why, in a real-world OpenX setup, you should always have a guaranteed delivery banner in every zone.

Why use capping?

Capping banners is not for everyone. Indeed, it makes little sense to apply capping to banners that are there to simply take up unsold inventory.

However, it is widely believed that as the number of times a user has seen a banner increases, the likelihood of that user clicking on the banner decreases¹. As a result, if you are running CPC or CPA campaigns, you may find that you will make better use of your inventory by applying capping, so that you don’t show the banners to these users too many times — and once the capping limits have been reached for a given user, then you can show the user the lower earning CPM campaigns.

Cookies & first time users

One important thing to note about banners with delivery caps applied is that they are managed using cookies. If OpenX cannot set cookies, then banners with delivery capping applied will never be shown. This is because, if capped banners were shown to users who had cookies disabled, then these users would be able to see capped campaigns infinitely. For cases where you have actually sold inventory on a capped basis, this would obviously be very bad — which is why OpenX does not do it.

However, this does mean that on the very first visit a user ever makes to your site, OpenX will not yet know if it can set a cookie or not. As a result, on this very first ever impression, OpenX will not deliver a capped banner. It will wait until the second impression to do so, when it can then be sure if it was able to set a cookie from the first impression. This may be important, if you absolutely require that a certain banner be shown to all users on their first visit to your site — in this case, you will need to use an uncapped banner.

1. It is surprisingly hard to find any actual evidence to back up this belief, though. Please comment below if you have a reference to any! [↩]

The OpenX ad server’s Maintenance Prioritization Engine (MPE) calculates priorities for banners in Contract campaigns. (OpenX’s Contract (Exclusive) and Remnant campaign types have their banners delivered based on relative campaign weights and banner weights.)

However, if you read the fine print about how the MPE works, you may notice that every zone in OpenX has a default zone impression forecast — that is, OpenX assumes that, until it is able to learn what kind of inventory is available in a zone, that it has this number of impressions per hour.

This means that if you create a zone in OpenX, but don’t actually generate its zone tag and put it on your web site (which in turn means that OpenX will never see any requests for banners in the zone), then the OpenX ad server will continue to assume that this zone has the default number of impressions/hour.

While this might not seem like a big deal, consider this: the default is 1,000 impressions/hour. If you link a campaign to just one such “inactive” zone, then the OpenX ad server will think that there are 24,000 more impressions available per day than there really are. That’s a lot of impressions — and the more inactive zones you link your campaigns to, the more of these incorrectly assumed impressions will exist!

This will cause your Contract campaigns to under-deliver.

As a result, you should never link your campaigns or banners to zones that are inactive.

If you’re a small website publisher, and you run your own OpenX ad server on the same server as your website, then you know that when your server goes down, everything stops. That’s just a fact of life for small website publishers, and there’s not much you can to but get your server back up and running as soon as possible.

However, if you are lucky enough to have seen your site grow up over time, or you work for a company that has a large site, you may be in a position where you run OpenX on a server that is different to the one that runs your website. (If you use the OpenX Hosted service, then you’re in the same situation — OpenX is running on a server that is different to the one that runs your website.)

If this is the case, then there is a possibility that the OpenX ad server system might go down, but your website server will still be up and running.

If this has ever happened to you, then you will know that this matters — and not just because your banners will not display. It can actually be a major issue because if the OpenX ad server is down, then your website may “hang” when it gets to the part of the site where a banner should be displayed¹. This is bad news for your users, because they won’t be able to view your website properly.

Below is the complete list of OpenX’s different zone tag types², and their susceptibility to this problem:

• Singe Page Call: Susceptible³.
• Javascript: Susceptible.
• iframe: Not susceptible.
• Interstitial or Floating DHTML: Susceptible.
• Image: Not susceptible.
• No Cookie Image: Not susceptible.
• Popup: Susceptible.
• XML-RPC: Susceptible⁴.

In all of the above cases, remember, the zone tags that are susceptible will cause your website to hang at the point where the tag is located in your site’s HTML during loading, so that your users won’t be able to see the entire page without some kind of delay. This means that it’s got nothing to do with whether banners load or not, as in all cases, if your OpenX ad server is not responding, you won’t get any banners displayed⁵.

So, if you have an OpenX ad server in use that doesn’t live on the same server as your website, what can you do to protect yourself from this situation?

Use a tag type that is not susceptible to the hanging page problem

As you may be aware, the Single Page Call and the Javascript zone tags provide advanced features that are not available in other tag types, just as supporting companion positioning, and the ability to avoid duplicating banners, etc. Assuming that you don’t need these features, then simply using the iframe or Image zone tag types makes sense⁶.

End place tags & position with CSS

Assuming that you would like the advanced features of the Single Page Call or Javascript zone tags, then it is possible to avoid hanging issues by placing the tags at the very end of your page’s HTML, and then positioning the banners on the page via CSS.

For example, here’s how you might place a Single Page Call tag at the end of a page, and position the banner via CSS⁷:

...

<p>End of HTML page!</p>

<!-- Generated by OpenX 2.8.1 -->
<script type='text/javascript'
  src='http://www.example.com/openx/www/delivery/spcjs.php?id=1'>
</script>

<div style="position: absolute; top: 10px; right: 10px;">
<script type='text/javascript'><!--// <![CDATA[
 /* [id1] Website 1 - Zone 1 */
 OA_show(1);
// ]]> --></script><noscript><a target='_blank'
  href='http://www.example.com/openx/www/delivery/ck.php?n=f1bb21f'>
  <img border='0' alt=''
  src='http://www.example.com/openx/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&amp;n=f1bb21f'
/></a>
</noscript>
</div>

</body>
</html>

There are many ways of CSS positioning, of course. Use whatever method suits you best!

Disadvantages

It is worth mentioning that is you do decide to use end placement of tags and position with CSS, this means that your banners will be the very last items to load on your web page. This means that you may find that you have a reduced number of impressions, as a result of users “navigating away” from the page before the banners have loaded; this in turn may result in reduced income (either through fewer impressions for CPM campaigns, or through fewer clicks/conversions for CPC/CPA campaigns).

However, this is something you will need to make a judgement call on — is it better to sacrifice a little income to ensure that your users can view your website immediately, albeit without banners, in the event that your external OpenX ad server has a problem; or is it better that if your OpenX ad server goes down, your website is not accessible?

Modify the OpenX tags

Finally, if you really want to get creative, you can modify the OpenX tags. This is for advanced users only, though. Best of luck!

1. How long might your site hang for before the rest of the content loads? This depends on exactly how the OpenX ad server has failed. The worst case, however, is when the server is not responding to requests, in which case most browsers will hang for minutes. [↩]
2. The Local Mode zone tag is not included as this tag can only be used when OpenX is installed on the same server as the website. [↩]
3. Additionally, as the Single Page Call tag, by default, recommends that part of the tag code be placed in the HTML document’s <head> section, this will cause the page to hang before any part of your web site has been displayed. [↩]
4. Results may vary, depending on the implementation language used. With the default PHP-based XML-RPC zone tag, the implementation actually causes the web page to hang at the start of the document, so page loading hangs before any content has been displayed. However, the default tag has a timeout of 15 seconds, which is much shorted than the hanging time for the other tags. [↩]
5. It also means that in all cases, the user’s browser will not appear to complete loading the page contents, even for the non-susceptible tags — it’s just that even though the browser will keep spinning, trying to load the banners, at least all of the other page content will have loaded for the user to see. [↩]
6. Remember that the zone tag type can only display image based banners; it can’t display Flash, text and HTML banners, for example. The No Cookie Image zone tag type is another special case, for displaying image based banners in Email/Newsletter zones. [↩]
7. It’s a contrived example, as you’d probably never use the Single Page Call zone tag for just one zone, but it illustrates the concept [↩]

As you may have read in the OpenX 2.8.1 release notes:

Zone probabilities are distributed amongst campaigns, independent of the number of banners. OX-3095

This means that it is now possible to divide a zone’s inventory up between the linked campaigns by campaign weight, without having to re-calculate all of the weightings when a new banner is added.

As a result, Tip #8: Understand the banner delivery process has been updated to describe the different delivery process for OpenX releases before and after version 2.8.1.