Optimise CPC And Remnant Ads With Free OpenX Ad Server

Until recently, the only Cost per Click (CPC) network I’ve used on my sites is Google Adsense because the performance of the links are very consistent.  In fact, the Google Adsense ads I run in my posts still give me my best overall eCPM – much better than the few cents that some sites seem to get from Google Adsense.  Historically in my other ad units I’ve only ever run CPM ads, but recently I’ve had some success with running affiliate and other CPC banners managed by the OpenX Ad Server to ensure that only well performing banners are displayed.

I used to shy away from running affiliate banners because in my view they were risky as you never knew how much you would make and could end up not making a penny, whereas with CPM ads at least you would always get paid something. I use a number of CPM networks to try and ensure I get the maximum fill rate each day.  They are daisy-chained so that if one network can’t display a banner or hit my minimum CPM, then they pass the impression onto the next network in the chain.

At the end of the daisy chain I have a network who guarantee to display a paying remnant ad if they can’t display a campaign.  Although I’m lucky that I never have any PSA ads or blank slots, the CPM for the remnant ads isn’t great so I started at looking at alternative ways of improving the revenue I make from my remnant traffic.

I’m quite happy with the system I’ve implemented this week, which is working brilliantly and has opened up a whole new potential revenue stream for me.  I’ve been using the free OpenX Ad Server that allows you to run and manage your own ad campaigns.  One of the great features in OpenX is the ability to automate the serving of campaigns, so that the highest paying campaign is always showed first.  OpenX automatically calculates the highest eCPM prioritization by calculating the effective CPM for each of your CPC, CPA and CPM-based remnant campaigns and then determines the optimum weight to assign to each campaign so as to maximize your overall revenue.

This is best demonstrated by a worked example. Let’s say I have 3 campaigns:

• Campaign 1: My Remnant network deal that pays a fixed (or average) CPM of $0.5 (not the actual amount)
• Campaign 2: Affiliate banner where I get paid $30 per sale, where I know that I get 1 sale for every 20 clicks i.e. an average revenue per click or eCPC of $1.5
• Campaign 3: CPC deal paying $0.1 per click

When loading up these campaigns I can tell OpenX how much each one makes – $0.5CPM, $1.5CPC and $0.1CPC.  OpenX then starts serving test impressions and monitors the performance of each campaign.  If it finds that for Campaign 2 it takes 50,000 impressions to generate the 20 clicks to get one sale and $30 of revenue (20x$1.5CPC), then it works out that the eCPM is $0.60 ($30/50k impressions).  It now knows that Campaign 2’s CPM of $0.6 beats Campaign 1’s, so it will show Campaign 2 more often than Campaign 1.

If it finds that Campaign 3 is getting a good CTR, say 3%, then because I’ve told OpenX each click is worth $0.1 then it knows that 1,000 impressions will make $3 i.e. that the eCPM is $3 (30 clicks x $0.1).  So, even though the CPC is low OpenX knows this this is actually the best campaign out of the 3 and will show Campaign 3 more often the other two.

To ensure that OpenX always has the right data, it serves a minimum number of impressions of each campaign each day –  I’ve set mine to 100.  Using this method I’m now running a handful of affiliate/CPC ads on my sites to supplement my CPM adverts.  I’ve even setup OpenX to serve my network CPM ads by uploading their tags and manually entering the average CPM I see from these ads, so that if any of my CPC/affiliate deals are performing better than my CPM networks then these ads will be shown more often.

OpenX allows you to run and test multiple offers at the same time.  Loading up a new campaign only takes a few mins, and once uploaded the only additional work that is required is to update the eCPC numbers for affiliate deals based on the sales conversion you are seeing from your clicks.  The video below shows how easy it is to load a campaign to OpenX:

I’ve loaded up about half a dozen affiliate deals so far – if you have any others that you’ve used on your sites that have worked well for you then please let me know so I can load up more campaigns!

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