Although, I’ve seen a few posts that explain the benefits of setting up Alternate Url Ads for your adsense ads ( like my own), but I haven’t seen anyone write about using Openads to ensure that the best performing ads are displayed.
For those of you don’t know what Alternate Url ads are, these are the ads that you can manually select to be shown for popular schemes like Google Adsense when they can’t display an ad, usually because no keywords can be matched. The way most bloggers utilise this spare capacity is to enter the url of an in-house ad that is displayed instead. JohnTP gives some good instructions on how to do this.
The main drawback of this method is that you can only display one ad creative at a time, and usually very limited stats are available. What I’ve done using the free Openads software is rather than inserting the code of one banner at this url, is insert Openads ad serving code here so that I can display multiple ads in rotation in any given ad slot. For instance if you refresh this page, the 125×125 ad in my sidebar will refresh and show a different ad.
The beauty of this approach is that I get brilliant stats on which ads get high clickthrough rates and which don’t, so that I can show the better performing ads more often and remove the ads that don’t work. This can be vital as most affiliate schemes provide several ad variants that can be used and without an ad server like Openads you have to guess which variant will work the best on your site. I no longer have to guess – I just add them all via Openads and then remove the ones that don’t work.
With Openads you can do other smart things like:
- If you have a paying campaign (like the Daily Blog Tips campaign currently running on my site) you can ensure that this campaign runs first
- You can even create accounts for your advertisers so they can see their stats and also add or remove banners themselves to their campaigns
- Ensure that a different ad/campaign is shown for each page view to improve clickthroughs e.g. if an ad wasn’t interesting to a user on the first display, then why would it be on the 2nd? Showing a different ad will increase your chances of getting a click
- You can even set Openads to show each ad only once to each user
- Apply different weights to campaigns so that your better performing ads/campaigns get shown more often by Openads
- Fix how many times a certain ad is shown per day/week
- Control what times of the day a particular ad is shown (haven’t found a practical application for this yet)
Another feature I like about Openads is that it makes it easy to manage multiple ads/campaigns on multiple sites. For instance I now have 5 sites across my ‘network’. If I want to add say a new 125×125 banner I just have to load it once into the Openads system, and then choose which sites I want that particular banner to be displayed on, when and how frequent.
Openads is such a powerful tool that in the latest version it can even deliver adsense ads and track the clicks. I’m not using this feature yet, but if I can find a way for Openads to tell me on which pages ads were clicked then I will definitely serve my adsense ads this way.
To read more about Openads click here.
