Want to take your site advertising campaigns to the next level? Install OpenX, a free ad server with all open source goodness that can let webmasters manage advertising campaigns on their site like a pro. For most site owners, simple cut and paste ad code scripts work, but on growing popular sites, a personal ad server can help you sell more higher paying ads and earn money by optimizing ad campaigns to suit your needs.
Manage Site advertising like a Pro
I recently installed OpenX on our site, primarily to meet the growing geotargeting requirements of advertisers. Fortunately Dreamhost, our webhosting service lets you install OpenX as a one-click install in minutes and takes care of a lot of installation hassles. After opting for OpenX, deciding the new database details, a quick painless auto-installation, followed by a quick email from Dreamhost with installation instructions, and OpenX was live in a few minutes.
If your host does not offer a one-click install, then you can read up the first time installation instructions and get started quickly yourself. The OpenX Administrator Guide describes how to install and upgrade OpenX and provides information on the Openads settings and maintenance procedures. The extensive FAQ will take care of any doubts you may have. OpenX is free, its open source and is an ad serving software used by more than 30,000 publishers in more than 100 countries. It was formerly called Openads and phpAdsNew.
Rotate Ads, Geotarget Ads, Sell Direct Ads
I have started testing it recently and am trying geotargeting options with integrated Maxmind GeoIP technology to serve ads to target countries. Many advertising programs now feature ads and advertisers who target a specific world audience only. Many advertising programs display paid ads for US visitors (or few selected countries), with non paying ads for the rest of the world.
Though many new programs like Chitika Premium causes ads to vanish when non-US visitors view the ad getting you higher eCPMs, or Widgetbucks which will display alternate CPM ads for the rest of the world. We recently joined Forbes network, which has an amazing Adify panel where they geotarget the visitors themselves, provide you lots of options to serve multiple alternate ads for unsold inventory. Google Adsense has built in options to display alternate ads and even collapsing ads instead of serving public service ads.
But my UnrulyMedia campaign targets UK visitors and the pay-per-view Video ads display worldwide, but pay for only UK visitors. Now with OpenX, my own free ad server, I can geotarget my ads. I create new publishers zones which show ads when the visitors are from UK, and the ad collapses for the rest of the non-UK visitors, making me show paying ads only, and save ad space (I can even rotate other ads in its place).
I can now create powerful custom ad units where I can add up several different ads, rotate these ads, assign multiple rules when these ads will show, decide the weight-age when these ads will show (much like Commission Junction smart zones) and there are endless options which webmasters can utilize to run direct sale ad campaigns with their advertisers and letting them see their ad statistics.
There are so many features that you have to try yourself to see them. Try this OpenX demo and try it out yourself.