OpenX is an Open Source Ad Server and Ad Management System. OpenX is an Open Source Ad Server written in PHP using a MySQL database. OpenX gives you mainly 3 things. 1) Control. Maximise your revenue by showing the right ad campaigns to the right people. 2) Transperancy. Track the performance of all your online advertising from one intuitive interface. 3) Freedom. Free to mix direct, network and house ads to optimise your revenue per page.

This control over your ad management allows you to be very specific in your ad testing and ad placements, giving you the highest amount possible of ad profitability. OpenX is Licensed under the GNU Public License version 2. Meaning that it is open source to all under a very true type of open source license, that being the GNU Public License.

Server Requirements

Any web server with PHP support specifically PHP 4.3.11 or higher. For the database OpenX requires MySQL 4.0.18 or higher. Other server requirements include Linux, Unix and BSD based operating systems, Apache or lighttpd web server, PHP eAccelerator, PHP_Cache or similar.

Why OpenX?

Are you an hosting ads of any kind on any of your websites? Are you hosting multiple ads on multiple websites? OpenX is perfect for managing all ad campaigns for all of your websites in once central location! And it's completely free and open source, otherwise I wouldn't be talking about it here. OpenX claims to be running on over 30,000 websites currently. It's widely tested and used and has been around for quite a while. So it's a tride and true open source project with a solid community behind it.

This is personally one of my favorite open source applications out there. The fact that you can have your own ad server to manage all of your ads in an almost enterprisse fashion, for free, is outstanding!

Features & Benefits of OpenX

Delivery and targeting - Make more money by controlling who sees what. OpenX allows you to deliver ads from multiple advertisers and ad networks. You can give priotority to higher value ad campaigns. Target advertising to higher value visitors based on location, user data, keywords and more. You can increase overall click through rates by limiting how often visitors see a campaign. And finally, you can integrate with existing customer databases to improve ad targeting.

Inventory Management – save time managing your ad spaces. One of the major advantages of OpenX is the ability to manage your total ad space from one intuitive interface. And you can do this through multiple websites. This is especially important for affililate marketers who manage tens, even hundreds of websites with ads all over them.

Statistics – make better trafficking decisions. With OpenX you are able to track and compare the performance of your ad campaigns. This is critical to getting the most profitability from your ad space. Track the relative performance of different parts of your websites. You can export all your statisitcal data to excel spreadsheets for your own analysis.

Reporting – improve customer relations. In many instances, you may have a website that has vendors purchase ad space through a subscription. In this case it's important to be able to report back to the vendor certain statistics and analytics on how their ad is performing. With OpenX, you can generate campaign-specific performance reports for advertisers. You can also give advertising clients direct access to ad campaign reporting. And finally, you can export statistics to excel for custom reporting and send them off to your vendors.

Camaign Management – take on professional advertising contracts and deliver. Serve ads from direct advertisers alongside ads from ad networks. You can distribute the deliver of ad campaigns evenly for their lifespan. Also set ad campaign goals such as start and end dates, as well as performance targets based on clicks, impressions, or conversions.

Conversion tracking – track what really matters. With OpenX you can track clicks through to conversions so you know the true value of your advertising. You can also run your own affiliate campaigns/programs.

Efficient and Scalable – no need to learn new tools as you grow. OpenX allows you to deliver hundreds of millions of ads each month from a single ad server! You can use a feature of OpenX called Distributed Statistics which can scale t serve literally billions of ads using what's called server farms.

What Does All This Mean?

Basically, use OpenX to run all of your ad management so that it's easy and time efficient. Or, if you are need of an affiliate program for your site use OpenX as well. In order to get the most profitability from your ad displays you need to be able to track and analyze everything, from ad impressions all the way to the user actually clicking on the ads. OpenX is perfect for this and best of all, it's Open Source!

Some Additional Features/Specifications

• Smoothly deliver campaigns across a timeline
• Rotate different ads and ad networks
• Manage all types of ad formats
• Companion positioning
• Traditional image, HTML and JavaScript ad formats
• Integrated Flash support
• Plugin Support for Custom Tag
• Support for Google AdSense
• Geo-targeting !!!!
• Contextual targeting
• Keyword targeting
• Behavioural targeting
• Use ads from one campaign for all ad locations on a page
• Revenue Reporting

Setting up OpenX on Lunarpages

I have tested and configured the OpenX ad server on a Lunarpages shared hosting account. Here are my step by step instructions for what I did...

• Download files from openx.org
• Unzip file and upload contents into the directory of your choice on your server
• Make the var folder writable and the www/images folder writable by the webserver
• Go to your Cpanel and create a database and database user
• Assign the two together
• Run the installation script by going to the folder (eg. http://yourdomain.com/openx)
• Fill out the database connection information
• Go through the rest of the wizard
• You're up and running! Setup time should take no longer than 20 minutes