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…

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.)

If you are using the OpenX ad server to display banners on your website, then you are almost certainly also interested in viewing the details of the users who visit your website.

To obtain this information, some people use third party services like Google Analytics, which collects data via a tag that is inserted into a website’s pages. Other people download and install Piwik, which also uses a tag inserted into a website’s pages. However, many people still use older tools like AWStats or Webalizer to analyze their web server log files instead.

If you are using a web server log analyzer, then you should keep in mind that the calls to OpenX to request, display and log banners will probably end up being added to your web server log file¹. As a result, if you are using a tool like AWStats or Webalizer, you should consider updating the configuration of the log file analyzer to ignore, or otherwise separate out, the OpenX ad server log entries, otherwise your page hit information in these tools will be greatly over-stated.

1. This will depend on exactly how OpenX is installed, and how your web server logging has been configured [↩]

Great news! Long time OpenX community member Heiko Webber has announced a patch to allow the OpenX ad server to display statistics by country.

Although the OpenX plugin framework in OpenX 2.8 clearly needs further work by the OpenX team, as Heiko has been forced to release this functionality as a patch, rather than a separate plugin, this is still great news for all OpenX ad server users who have been missing this feature.

Thanks Heiko!