My employer recently asked me to research some possible additions to our member service offerings, specifically website ads and targeted email. Having some experience with both, I offered up my thoughts as well as some potential options. Specifically Lyris (email marketing) and phpAds (web ads). After doing some quick digging and a phone call, I ended up with Constant Contact (instead of Lyris) and OpenX (successor to phpAds).
I will discuss what brought me to choose Constant Contact over Lyris in another post.
As for OpenX, I was more than pleased to find out that:
- It’s open sourced and free
- You can get a free hosted account with OpenX
- They are partnered with Rackspace, with whom I have copious professional experience and is my employer’s hosting company
All those facts made the choice of OpenX very easy.
Now, after installing OpenX, I still had to get it up and running. While they offer plenty of help in this area, I remained true to myself and my XY chromosomes and went in blindly. “I can figure this out”, right? Well, maybe, but not without going back and looking over those quick start guides. It turns out when I created my banner listing, I also chose the web server option for serving up the image. Fairly simple right? Sure, except I could not get a single ad to show up. After looking at the quick start guide (linking again, in case your are also chromosomally challenged), it turns out OpenX uses a SQL stored ad in their example. I didn’t choose this one at first, because I was afraid it would actually store the image in my database. I am unsure if it does this, but when this option is selected, it works great. Thanks OpenX, you’re my hero.
After the initial setup, it took me a little longer to insert the javascript and get not one, but two, two ads running on the same page. Tip: don’t invoke all the javascript offered in the “Invocation Code” tab. Just reuse the section that loads the new ad. Otherwise, only the first ad will appear. Read more about this “Single Page Call” here.
The other things I learned:
- You can change the amount of time between statistics updates
- You can filter out traffic from a specific IP, e.g. your employer or customer, to get a truer sense of traffic patterns
That’s it. We will be using OpenX right away to start serving our own ads and will offer it to our members very soon. Great tool, it should work well for anyone.