Learning the essentials of online advertising with a sample will give you a very useful projection about what you can benefit using the OpenX Ad Server. It will provide you a strong foundation to get the most out of OpenX Ad Server main features.

As the majority of web hosting service providers do not have one-click installation for OpenX, we have to install OpenX on our own in most cases. Installing OpenX Ad Server is not a difficult task and follows a standard procedure just like other PHP and MySQL-based open source software. On the other hand, there are some important key points that we should be careful about:

In this chapter, we shall learn about:

This chapter is suggested for reading even if you are a tech-savvy computer user, as you can eliminate the possible problems while installing OpenX Ad Server.

Basics of OpenX Ad Serving

OpenX Ad Server system was designed to manage all aspects of an online advertising business efficiently. Here, we will briefly look at the main OpenX terms and their interaction with each other.

An advertiser is the person (people) or organization who owns the banners that you will display in your advertisement serving environment (blogs, websites, e-mail newsletters, and so on).

A campaign is a set of banners that is targeted to promote a service or product(s) typically.

A banner is a creative content that will be displayed as an advertisement. The most common banner formats are images png, jpg, gif, animated gifs, text links, JavaScripts, Texts, HTML, and Flash (SWF) files.

An advertiser can have multiple campaigns and each campaign can have any number of banners inside. The following sample diagram shows the relationship among the termsâ advertiser, campaign, and banner:

A website is the representation of publisher side on OpenX system where advertisements will be shown.

A zone is a predefined placeholder in a website to show banners. A website can have multiple zones.

Banners or campaigns can be connected to zones in OpenX Ad Server environment. Here is a sample connection diagram:

An ideal advertisement statement is the complete presentation of a banner using all the terms and target parameters.

For example, an iPhone case manufacturer (Fictitious Cases) wants to start a campaign for their latest leather case Model X on several blogs.

Now, let's define a sample ideal advertisement statement using several parameters.

The advertiser, Fictitious Cases wants to start iPhone Leather Case Model X campaign. The campaign will be activated next week on Monday at 10:00 automatically. The campaign will end in 120 days and banners will automatically expire from the system after 120 days. If the campaign reaches 10,000 clicks or 4,000,000 impressions before 120 days, the campaign will end up automatically as well as will not wait until the end date.

The banners will be shown on the top 728x90 pixel zone of gadget blog A, on the right 125x125 zone of the mobile phone review site B, and as a text link on the zone defined at the end of each blog post of site A.

They have added three 728x90 banners namely A1, A2, and A3; two 125x125 banners namely B1 and B2; and one text link as "Buy Super Model X here" namely C1.

As the company is selling its cases to only US customers, the website visitors coming from other countries will not be able to see these ads, thus advertiser's inventory of clicks or impressions will not be spent. The banners in the campaign will be shown to website visitors only in US working hours.

The advertiser thinks that each visitor should only see a banner maximum of three times. So, if a banner reaches this impression count for a visitor, another banner will be shown instead. So, if the banner A1 is shown three times for a unique visitor, A2 or A3 will be shown on next impression.

The advertiser thinks that A1 banner is much appealing than A2 and A3, and sets a higher banner impression weight, 3 for A1, 1 for A2 and A3. So, A1 as three times more chances of being shown than the others.

The following diagram shows this Sample campaign:

OpenX Ad Server allows defining a detailed campaign like in this example. We will learn how to implement an example similar to this and more in OpenX system in further chapters and see how OpenX is the vital solution to manage an advertisement network.