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.

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…

Newcomers to OpenX often ask a seemingly simple question: “Why don’t I have the same number of impression in OpenX as page views in my website stats program?”

As is often the case, the answer is never quite as simple as the question, and you may need to look in a few different places before reaching the “aha!” moment where all becomes clear.

Number of ads per page

The most obvious starting point in the page views vs. OpenX impressions conundrum is to check how many ads you have per page on your site. If you have more than one ad per page, then you should have more OpenX impression than page views. If you have some pages without any ads, then you should have less OpenX impression than page views.

Of course, if you have some pages with one or more ads, and some without, or pages with varying numbers of ads per page, then obviously, you’ll need to do a little bit of maths to figure out your expected ratio of OpenX impressions to page views!

This might all seem pretty obvious, but it’s still worth noting, as it’s often overlooked.

Drop off

In the event that you have consistently less impression in OpenX than you were expecting relative to your number of page views, then drop off could be the culprit. Drop off occurs when a user clicks on a link in your page content, clicks the back button on the browser, or maybe even goes to a completely different page or even site before the ads on the page have loaded from OpenX and had their impressions recorded.

Now, some level of drop off is normal, and to be expected. You will never be able to eliminate drop off entirely, so please don’t waste your time trying!

However, if you are suffering from a high level of drop off — that is, very many less ad impressions than you were expecting — then there are three main possible reasons for this:

• Poor site load performance can lead to drop off, as users don’t wait for the entire page to load before navigating to another page. For this reason, it is important that you measure your site performance;
• Very large banner sizes and slow 3rd party tags can be a cause of ads loading slowly, which may obviously result in ads not fully loading by the time users go to another page; and
• The location of your ads on the page¹ or the use of end page placement & positioning with CSS can also result in drop off.

You can look at the difference in requests vs. impression in OpenX to help you diagnose drop off issues.

Web log analyzer issues

Web log analyzers look at web server logs to generate the number of page impressions on your site. If you are using a web log analyzer, and you are seeing a ratio of OpenX impression to page views that don’t make sense, then the following are all worth investigating:

• Check that your web log analyzer is working properly — is it processing all your log files? Is your web server logging everything that it should be?;
• Is your web log analyzer correctly excluding items from your web server log that are not page impressions? That is, are all calls to images, CSS files, JavaScript files, etc. being correctly excluded from page view counts? Most web log analyzers should do this by default, but it is worth double-checking; and
• Finally, have you set up your web log analyzer to exclude all of the calls to the OpenX scripts from being analyzed?

1. Ads placed at the bottom of the page are more likely to result in drop off. [↩]

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.)