OpenX Tips

Did you know that in OpenX 2.8, you can, when Working as the Administrator account, go to Configuration > Global Settings > Banner Logging Settings, and in the Block Banner Logging Settings section, specify a list of IP addresses and user-agents which you do not want to log any statistics from?

If you have a small list of known IP addresses and/or user-agents that are causing invalid spikes in your statistics that you would like to block, then this is the place to do it.

Alternatively, if you are a relatively large publisher, you can use the IAB Spiders & Bots list here.

Have you ever seen this in your OpenX installation?

User-level statistics preferences

You’ll find this in your OpenX 2.8 installation under My Account > Preferences > User Interface Preferences, and here you can change your account’s preferences for which columns you would like to see on the statistics screens, and in which order they appear.

However, for newcomers to OpenX (and even to most experienced OpenX users), it’s perhaps not immediately obvious what all of these columns actually are. So, here’s The Guru’s guide to all of these acronyms…

• ID: The ID of the item being shown in the statistics, such as the advertiser ID, campaign ID, banner ID, website ID, zone ID, etc.

• Requests: Shown as “Req.” on statistics pages. As you would imagine, the number of requests. Will only be populated if requests have been enabled in your OpenX install.

• Impressions: Shown as “Impr.” on statistics pages. Again, pretty obvious — the number of impressions.

• Clicks: You guessed it — the number of clicks.

• Click-Through Ratio: Shown as “CTR” on statistics pages. The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. If you have 1000 impressions and 5 clicks, your CTR is 5 divided by 1000, or 0.5%.

• Conversions: Shown as “Conv.” on statistics pages. The number of (approved) conversions, otherwise known as “actions” or “acquisitions” from a CTA based campaign.

• Pending Conversions: Shown as “Pend. conv.” on statistics pages. The number of pending (i.e. not yet approved) conversions.

• Impression SR: Shown as “Impr. SR” on statistics pages. The impression based “sales ratio”, being the number of conversions divided by the number of impressions. If you have 1000 impressions, 5 clicks and and 1 conversion, your Impression SR is 1 divided by 1000, or 0.1%.

• Click SR: The click based “sales ratio”, being the number of conversions divided by the number of clicks. If you have 1000 impressions, 5 clicks and 1 conversion, your Click SR is 1 divided by 5, or 20%.

• Basket value: Shown as “BV” on statistics pages. OpenX supports the addition of tracking variables to conversions, and one of these is the “Basket value” type. When set, OpenX considers this value to be the value of the conversion — so, for example, if the user is converting by making a purchase, the value of the purchase can be passed in as a “Basket value” tracking variable, and OpenX will display the sum of all the different conversion sales values in the BV column.

• Number of items: Shown as “Num. Items” on statistics pages. Another tracking variable supported by OpenX conversions is the “Number of items” type, which can be used to track the number of items purchased by a user when a conversion occurs. As with the “Basket value” type, the “Num. Items” column will show the sum of all the different numbers of items purchased in the conversions.

• Revenue: Shown as “Rev.” on statistics pages. The revenue generated by your campaigns. If, for example, you have set up a campaign with a CPM pricing model of $1.50, and you have delivered 500 impressions, then you would expect the revenue for the campaign to be $0.75.

• Revenue CPC: A duplicate of ECPC below.

• ECPM: The effective (revenue) cost per thousand impressions. That is, the effective CPM generated by the campaign, no matter how the revenue was generated. (Revenue could have come from a CPM, CPC or conversion basis.)

• ECPC: The effective (revenue) cost per click. That is, the effective CPC generated by the campaign, no matter how the revenue was generated.

• ECPS: The effective (revenue) cost per sale (conversion). That is, the effective CPA generated by the campaign, no matter how the revenue was generated.

You will also note that there are columns for ERPM (effective revenue per thousand impressions), ERPC (effective revenue per click), ERPS (effective revenue per sale), EIPM (effective income per thousand impressions), EIPC (effective income per click) and EIPS (effective income per sale). However, these were all based on the ability to enter a “cost” for your zones in OpenX, to represent your ad serving costs (either internal, or external, if you use OpenX to manage externally purchased inventory) — but this is no longer possible, so these columns no longer provide you with any additional information to those above, and are therefore no longer worth displaying.

As with banner types, OpenX supports a number of different zone tag types. However, as zone tag types can be disabled in OpenX, it may be that the zone tag type you want to use is not present when you go to create a zone’s tag.

If this is the case, then you may need to enable the zone tag type.

OpenX 2.4

While logged in as the administrator account, go to Settings > Main Settings > Invocation Settings. Here, you will find the Allowed Invocation Types section, where you can select which of the zone tag types are enabled.

OpenX 2.6

While Working as the Administrator account, go to My Account > Global Settings > Banner Delivery Settings. Here, you will find the Allowed Invocation Types section, where you can select which of the zone tag types are enabled.

OpenX 2.8

While Working as the Administrator account, go to Plugins, and select the Details link for the openXInvocationTags plugin and finally, select the Settings link. Here, you will find the list of allowed zone tag types, where you can select which of the zone tag types are enabled.

The allowed zone tag types in OpenX

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. [↩]

Well, sort of. The Guru comes back from a break to find that while the release file of OpenX 2.8.5 is up on the OpenX site, there’s been no announcement from OpenX about this release, there’s nothing in the release notes in the download, and there are issues in OpenX’s own issue tracking system with regards to the release that are not resolved.

OpenX community member Erik Geurts has already posted a warning about this release – and his advice to avoid this release for now sounds eminently sensible, at least until someone from OpenX lets us know what’s going on. OpenX team, you out there???