OpenX Tips

Hi OpenX Tips readers! Thanks for sticking around — it’s hard to believe that OpenX Tips is nearly a year old!

To celebrate, The Guru is taking a couple of weeks off — but don’t worry, there are plenty of tips still to come!

See you all here again in March…

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…

Well, you go away for a holiday, and look what happens? OpenX go and release OpenX 2.8.4.

Luckily, the ever vigilant Erik Geurts has a blog post about the release, as well as the disappointing fact that you now need to have have, or sign up for an account with OpenX to be able to install or upgrade now.

In an AdExchanger.com article published at the end of last year, Bill Demas outlines his view of where online advertising will be going in 2010. In particular, The Guru thinks that all users of OpenX should take note of the following:

“In another paradigm shift, audience targeting will take on a whole new scope with the continued practice of advertisers buying ‘people’ instead of ‘pages’. These advancements are creating new efficiencies and transforming the way display advertising is bought and managed. They’re also having a bubble up effect upon advertisers, who are demanding improved performance and massive reductions in wasted ad spend. Another unforeseen effect is in the way it is changing the behaviors of media buyers: As one industry luminary put it, the ability to manipulate data and hand-pick your audience is “addicting.” In the near future, having a deep understanding of a target audience will be more important than having a broad reach, and any organization that brings this kind of knowledge to the table – coupled with the ability to execute upon the information – will be the big winners.”

So, if you’re a publisher using OpenX to run ads on your websites, how can you take part in this paradigm shift? How do you sell people to advertisers, instead of just impressions?

One way to do that is to enable the collection of information about people that you serve ads to, in order to enable retargeting. You can read all about how retargeting works — from an advertiser’s point of view — in a recent isocket blog post.

Of course, most OpenX users are not advertisers. So, how can you get involved in retargeting as a publisher?

Well, the team at Ad Server Plugins have just announced their behavioral targeting and retargeting plugin for OpenX! This plugin will let you, as a publisher, capture information about user behavior on your websites, which can then be used later to target advertising directly to specific ‘people’, instead of just to ‘pages’.

If you want to get involved, you can request pricing information from the Ad Server Plugins team via their site.

The team over at Ad Server Plugins have released a new version of the OpenX Statistics as Graphs plugin. If you haven’t yet tried out this plugin, The Guru recommends that you do!

(Please note: If you have elected to resolve the recently announced vulnerability in OpenX 2.8.2 by removing the specified files from your OpenX ad server installation, instead of by upgrading to OpenX 2.8.3, then you will need to upgrade to OpenX 2.8.3 before you can install this plugin — the files removed when following OpenX’s instructions mean that you cannot install any plugins until the upgrade has been performed.)