How To Use OpenX – Part 2

It’s been a while since I’ve posted the first part of this tutorial on How To Use OpenX! Well better late than never, in the second part of this tutorial I will show you how to manage your publisher inventory and add a banner to your website.

The publisher inventory is quite simple to understand. It has only 2 levels:

• publishers
  • zones

A zone is simply a visual area that will hold an ad on your web page.

Managing The Publisher Inventory

If you’re only going to display ads on your own website, this is going quite easy to manage. Start by logging in OpenX and click on the Inventory tab at the top and select Publishers and Zones.

If there is a “Default Publisher”, you can click on the Delete link next to it.

Click on Add New Publisher at the top and fill in the form. If you’re going to use OpenX for your own website(s) only, you can fill only the Basic Information section. There’s no need to create a user account for this publisher since you’re always going to use the administrator account. Click on Next when you’re done.

Now that you’ve got a new publisher added to your inventory, you need to add a new zone for this publisher. As I’ve said earlier, a zone is simply an area on your website in which you will display an ad.

From the Add New Zone tab, enter a name for name for the new zone. I don’t use the Description field often but I suggest you put a little more information in the Name field. This will make it easier to identify your zone in other OpenX menus.

When you’re done setting the zone type and size, hit Next.

Now click on the Linked Banners tab. You can now select individual banners or an entire campaign. For this tutorial, we’ll link an individual banner. Assuming you’ve added an advertiser to your inventory as described in part 1 of this OpenX tutorial, select Google advertiser, AdSense campaign and the Google AdSense 468×60 banner. Click on the little blue arrow next to the drop down menu to link the banner to this zone.

Banner Invocation

Our inventory now has an advertiser (Google) with a banner (AdSense) and we’ve added a publisher and a zone to which we linked a banner. All that’s left to do is to retrieve the invocation code needed for our website.

Click on the Inventory tab and then on Publishers & Zones. Expand My Website section and click on the newly created zone name. On the next page, select the Invocation Code tab.

You’ll notice that there are five (5) banner invocation types:

• Image Tag
• Javascript Tag
• Local Mode Tag
• XML-RPC Tag
• iFrame Tag

I will not go into details about all these invocation types but I will just say that I only use iFrame Tag and Javascript Tag. I’ve used the Local Mode Tag on a few occasions and it broke the MySQL database connection used by the website itself. For more information on the other invocation types, head over to OpenX.org.

One you’ve selected the invocation type, simply copy the bannercode from the textarea and paste it in your website’s template or webpage.

Et voilà! You’ve now got a nice OpenX installation serving ads on your website.

Of course you can link additional banners to a single zone and put them on rotation with different weights. You might also want to have a look at the statistics and reports, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there.

All in all, OpenX is a great ad server which might be a bit confusing at first. Once you get used to it, I’m sure you’ll appreciate very much.

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