I was wondering how you guys set up your sponsors and niche groups in OpenX. The program suggests that you use the “Advertiser” option to add sponsors but I’m thinking about using that for niches instead. The reason why is because niche groups are more important to me from an organizational standpoint. I need to quickly and easily add all my twink banners on my twink blogs, bear banners on my bear blogs and so on.
As I see it, if I add sponsors under Advertisers I would need to duplicate niches under Campaigns for each sponsor that had a site in that niche. For example, “Twinks” could be a campaign under Gunz Blazing, Badpuppy and several other sponsors. When it came time to find all my twink banners I’d have to remember each Advertiser and Campaign that has them, which, depending on my state of mind, could be trouble.
But if I set up Twinks, Bears, Bodybuilders, etc. each as an Advertiser, then I could set up a Campaign under each niche for different banner sizes and quickly find the banners I need. To me this seems like the fastest way to add the proper banners to my blogs.
I’m still new to this and playing with the program so maybe I’m missing something obvious. But since it sounds like several people here use OpenX I thought I’d ask how you set things up.
Personally I don’t use the Advertisers at all - I just have one - called ‘me’. Then I have all my campaigns under that. I guess it depends whatever works best for the individual user
Another question I had was how many zones you guys use per site. I normally have 30 to 50 banners on a page (they’re small ones) and somehow I think having that many zones would be a bad idea.
You can have multiple instances of the same zone on a page - so for example, if you have 30 ads in a sidebar you just need one zone for them all (unless you want zones for different campaigns to be in different places).
Another question I had was how many zones you guys use per site. I normally have 30 to 50 banners on a page (they’re small ones) and somehow I think having that many zones would be a bad idea.[/QUOTE]
I would be careful using OpenX to serve 30-50 banners on a single page. That’s just not going to be healthy for any page… that’s 30-50 script requests to OpenX every time someone views a page? That amount of banner you can only serve safely by using static images.
I know, I tested that myself at one point but it still 30-50 calls to the script. Even with a few hundred visitors to your site that’s hell of a lot of script calls to OpenX… and I have a feeling he wouldn’t have a dedicated server just for OpenX.
At least then you don’t have to worry about a server load. I still wouldn’t recommend calling that many external ads on a single page. I would go back and look at why you need OpenX to serve those ads. Open X is great for rotating ads equally and to control what shows up where and when. But normally you wouldn’t run more than a few ads on each page. I’ve ever run at most 2 adverts on the same page and the delay it caused was noticeable to me.
Now that I’ve been playing with OpenX I’m not sure it will work best for me. I like the ability to track individual banners to see which are the most popular with surfers but it seems like a lot of time to set this up if you run a blog network like me. Creating and then placing the invocation code on each of my blogs is quite an effort, although I realize I only have to do this once.
I’m wondering if some of you bypass the idea of adding all of your sites to OpenX and just add one, using that single code for all of your blogs. In this situation I realize that you won’t know which blogs the banners were clicked from, but if all you really want to know is which banners are generating hits then wouldn’t this strategy work? Or does it screw up OpenX if you put the invocation code generated for one site on all of your sites?
After playing around with OpenX this week I think I’ll stick with my original idea of using an iFrame for my blog sidebars. These can contain a whole bunch of banners and if I ever need to make a change its just one HTML file I need to modify. But I think I’ll still use OpenX for a header banner placement where I can experiment with different sponsors, putting their banners across my entire blog network to “blitz” a site and track the results. Thanks everyone for all your help!
