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…

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.

A few days ago, the guys at isocket tweeted about a recent article in MarketingVOX. This article may be of interest to OpenX ad server users, in particular, this part:

Smaller online ads may be more effective than larger counterparts, a new study by Dynamic Logic found.

The study shows that ad shape and placement may be more important than size. Half banners, at 234 x 60, and 180 x 150 rectangles were shown to be more effective than ads that frame the page, like high-profile leaderboards and skyscrapers. It is possible that users no longer see such framing ads because they have developed “banner blindness.”

In addition, smaller ads may be more effective because they tend to be better incorporated into the content of Web pages.

If you’re an OpenX user, then you know how much easier OpenX makes your life when it comes to delivering banners into your web site(s). However, it’s important to remember that if you’re looking to generate income from a site, then you should be thinking about maximizing that revenue — and if you are, you can’t simply set up your website once, and only experiment with different banners and ad networks. You also need to think about your site design, the banner sizes you have and where those banners are positioned. Unless you experiment with your site and banners, you won’t really be sure if you are maximizing your revenue.

Sure, it certainly takes more effort than just swapping banners in OpenX, but it can be worth it.

Along the same lines, OpenX community member and consultant Erik Geurts has a great post up about 7 common problems with landing pages, which is also worth reading, and may help you in your site and banner experiments in the search for improved advertising revenues.