Improve The Performance Of Your Alternate Urls Using Openads

February 22nd, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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.

openads

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.

Bookmark & Share

Related Posts

«« Time To Upgrade WordPress Again…..
What Features Would You Like Me To Add To/Remove From The Blog? »»

About the Author

author photo

Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

See All Posts by This Author

There Are 15 Responses So Far. »

Pages: « 2 [1] Show All

  1. #10

    Pingback by Sponsor My TypXP Reloaded WordPress Theme | Connected Internet on 8 March 2007:

    [...] slots on my TypoXP Reloaded WordPress theme. These will be served 50% of the time each using Openads. My theme is being downloaded roughly 1000 times a week, so every month there will be up to an [...]

  2. #9

    Comment by Dan and Jennifer on 27 February 2007:

    Thanks!

    Hmmm… I’d be looking at 10 ads per page loads, simply because they’re text links and many are small, like text-link-ads style.

    But i’d think that means 10 MySQL queries to find the ad content (stored in teh db) and then MySQL inserts to log the performance.

    Probably we’ll stay with 2.0 also since msot folks seem to be using that, meaning it’ll probably be more stable.

    One way to find out - guess I’ll install it and go production with it and see what happens. :-)

    Have an awesome day!
    Dan

  3. #8

    Comment by Everton Blair on 27 February 2007:

    Which version do you recommend? I’ve never used either one - 2.0 or the new 2.3 - but was wondering which one you prefer

    I’m not a heavy user as it’s only serving my alternate urls so I’m on 2.0x. I haven’t noticed a hit, but then again it’s not serving a banner for every page load. I don’t think the hit would be extensive anyway as it only tracks two variables - how many times an ad has been served and how many times it was clicked.

  4. #7

    Comment by Dan and Jennifer on 27 February 2007:

    Cool, thanks. I just found it too - somehow the 2nd time around it was very obvious. :-)

    We’re going to be implementing it for all our rotating text ads this weekend. Currently we just have no way of knowing which versions of our affiliate text ads are getting the most clicks and which ones are just hangin’ out.

    Which version do you recommend? I’ve never used either one - 2.0 or the new 2.3 - but was wondering which one you prefer. Here they are:
    http://www.openads.org/products/overview/products.html

    Oh - did you notice a major server resource hit from it? It’s obviously going to be hitting your MySQL db a bunch of times above and beyond what you have without it, but is it noticeable?

    Have an awesome day!
    Dan

  5. #6

    Pingback by Reader Tips: 25 February 2007 on 26 February 2007:

    [...] Openads - How this platform can help you improve the efficiency of your advertising plans. [...]

  6. #5

    Comment by Everton on 25 February 2007:

    yep, it does text ads as well (just checked)

  7. #4

    Comment by Dan and Jennifer on 25 February 2007:

    Hey Everton, thanks, this is a great idea.

    It’s on my list to set up alternate AdSense ads for our site, and this will give us a lot more control over the ads shown.

    One question on a related topic. Do you know if OpenAds can manage text ads as well? I was about to download it and try figuring this out as we’d like to track accurate performance metrics on all our rotating text ads. Those can be much more effective than banners. Now we’re using a very basic random ad rotation PHP script.

    Thanks.

    Have an awesome day!
    Dan

  8. #3

    Pingback by Rewarding Regular Readers - 23 Feburary 2007 - JohnTP.com on 23 February 2007:

    [...] Improve The Performance Of Your Alternate Urls Using Openads - Everton Blair [...]

  9. #2

    Comment by Everton on 22 February 2007:

    I was going to try Adlogger when I first started using WP and the author Trevor even installed it for me, but we never finished the installation. I might give it another go to track my adsense ads as it’s supposed to tell you which Adsense ads were clicked, but it doesn’t replace Openads

  10. #1

    Comment by Investor Trip on 22 February 2007:

    Funny you should mention this. Last night, I downloaded AdLogger to track my adsense clicks, but Open Ads looks a lot more versatile. This is exactly what I need! Thanks!

Pages: « 2 [1] Show All

Subscribe without commenting

Post a Response


Comment Policy: Any comments are permitted only because the site owner is letting you post, and any comments could be removed for any reason at the absolute discretion of the site owner.