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. [↩]

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…

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.

A couple of weeks ago, OpenX released a study of direct ad selling practices, based on survey data from the OpenX community. If you have not read it yet, it is well worth downloading the study.

In particular, the report outlines five different techniques that publishers with direct ad sales income of more than $5 CPM generally use, and which may be worth considering using yourself if you are planning on selling your inventory directly. For smaller publishers, this is very useful and valuable information to have. Kudos to OpenX for releasing the information!

Two days ago, Google announced the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a system for advertisers to buy inventory from publishers.

It would seem that the product is aimed mainly at large advertisers and advertising networks on one hand, and large publishers on the other. As a result, it would seem that for most OpenX users, this announcement will have little immediate relevance, although the exchange does support smaller advertisers through AdWords and smaller publishers through AdSense, which hopefully means that at the very least, OpenX users will be able to obtain higher levels of income from their AdSense banners.

Ultimately, though, Google’s announcement is welcome news for OpenX users as it seems to confirm that online advertising is slowly moving towards an open exchange market, where smaller publishers will be able to participate in online exchanges, like the OpenX Market, which will allow advertisers to more easily access obtain the most useful inventory for them, which should translate into higher earnings for publishers.