Manage Your Online Ads

OpenAds* is an Open Source Ad server that lets you manage your ads on different websites from a single user interface. It also lets you include Google AdSense, ValueClick, and much more

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Advertisements allow enterprises to reach their prospective customers, therefore managing ads and making sure that the right ad is displayed on the right website holds importance . OpenAds (free and Open Source ad server) offers a perfect solution for the aforementioned. In this article we show you how this Ad server can help you manage your ads easily. A look at three terms you would need to get familiarized with before we proceed:

1. Publisher: A publisher is one who owns a website on which the ads are displayed. The work of the publisher is to specify an ad area on the website.

2. Advertiser: An advertiser owns the ads to be displayed on the publisher's website. To start your ad server you need at least one advertiser.

3. Campaign: It is owned by advertisers and consists of set of banners which will be displayed on the publisher's website. Using this, the advetiser can set the frequency of ad delivery, priority setting, and limitation of the ads being displayed.

Installation
The Ad server can run on any Web server that supports PHP and MySQL. Let's assume that you already have a Web server running, along with the necessary requirement on a Fedora-based system. Now download the Ad server software from the website 'www.openads.org' and extract the files to the root folder of your Web server. Ad server provides you with a Web-based installation, so access its configuration page on a Web browser locally or through any client connected to the Ad server. For this, open Internet Explorer and put the URL as '/'. It brings you to the welcome page. Click on Next to proceed. After you agree the terms and policies, it checks your system to ensure that everything is properly installed. Initially, it would need write permissions on some of the folders within the 'OpenAd' folder. For this run the following command on the Ad server:

After extracting all the files of OpenAds, make sure you give correct permissions (read/writre) to folders before installation

# chmod a+w openads/var/
# chmod a+w openads/var/cache/
# chmod a+w openads/var/plugins/
# chmod a+w openads/var/plugins/cache/ # chmod a+w openads/var/plugins/cache/ # chmod a+w openads/var/plugins/config/
# chmod a+w openads/var/templates_compiled/
# chmod a+w openads/www/http://pcquest.ciol.com/2008/images/

After these commands are executed, click on 'continue' to proceed to database setup. Now, to set up your database provide the username and password to login into the MySQL database and also the database name that should be used for storing the data. In the advance section provide 'table name prefix' which will be added to the name of each table. This will help you distinguish between Ad server tables and other tables within the database. Click on 'continue' to proceed. Next it asks for basic configuration option such as language selection, time zone, and path to core folder. Once the configuration is done click on 'continue' to proceed. Now specify the administrator username, password, and the mail address of the administrator. And click on continue. Then it asks you that should it load any default data onto the server or not. This is basically for demo purpose only. Select 'yes' if you want or else 'no' and click on continue. This finishes the full installation of the Ad server.

You can create an ID in OpenAds for advertisers, using which they can login and configure their ads

Make sure that all the configurations are correct, such as delivery path, Web path, etc, while installing OpenAds

Creating advertiser accounts and campaigns
For creating advertiser log on to the Ad server, and navigate to 'Inventory > Advertiser and Campaigns' page. Click on the 'Add new advertiser' link provided in the page, it asks you to provide basic information of the advertiser such as name, contact, email, etc. It also provides you the option of notifying the advertiser through email whenever a campaign is activated or deactivated. Once all the info is filled, click on 'next' which will take you to the next page for creating campaign for the newly created advertiser. For creating campaign click on 'add new campaign' link provided on the page. Provide the necessary info such as inventory details in which you can specify 'impression booked.' Here a no. is allocated, eg 20, so only 20 times a particular ad will be displayed on a particular website. Second, the 'contract detail' in which you will specify the start and end date of a campaign. Third, 'priority level,' where you can set the priority of each ad which finally affects the delivery of the ads. For example the lowest priority ad will be displayed less number of times than a high priority ad. The interesting fact about this Ad server is that you can set an option called 'Delivery Capping.' Using this one can limit the no. of each ad that is being displayed on a particular website for a particular visitor. Once all the configuration and information are made click on 'Save Changes.'

Creating a publisher and zone
For creating a publisher navigate to 'Inventory >publishers & Zone' and click on 'Add new publisher' link. Fill up the info such as login details so that the publisher can login and have some basic control over their respective zones, payment details, and other information like unique users/month, page rank, category, and help file. Zone can be fully configured in the administrator mode and also allow you to link the campaign and banners from the inventory to a particular zone. Once the zone is created a simple HTML code is generated which is a giveaway code. This HTML code is copied and embedded into the existing HTML code of the publisher website. To create zone, navigate to Inventory>Publisher & Zones>PCQuest (name of the publisher)>Zone Overview and click on 'Add new zone' link. Fill up the necessary information, ie name of the zone (eg 'My Zone'), description, zone type, size, and cost. Zone type is an option by which you can decide how the banner will be displayed on the publisher's website, eg banner, pop up, text ads, etc. Click on 'next' to proceed. Then come the chain settings: if suppose there is no banner for a particular zone then what should it do? Should it stop delivering any banner or don't show any banner on that particular zone. Or it should append some HTML code defined by you. After completing the configuration click on 'Save Changes.'

Under the inventory tab you get all basic info of the 3 sections: Ads & campaigns, publishers & zones, and direct selection, as depicted

Creating banners
After creating the advertiser and publisher it's time to upload a banner. For this navigate to Advertisers & Campaigns> PCQuest (name of the advertiser)>Campaign Overview>PCQuest campaign (name of the campaign) >Banner Overview and then click on 'Add new banner' link. Next choose the type of banner:

1. Local banner (SQL)-stored locally on the OpenAd SQL server
2. Local banner (Web server)-stored by OpenAd server on an FTP site or a specific directory
3. External banner-stored on a remote server
4. HTML banner- these are simple HTML codes and Text Ads which include only text-based ads.

In our case it is a 'Local banner (SQL),' so select Local banner (SQL) from the drop down list, click on the 'browse' button, and navigate to the folder where your banner is kept. Select the banner you want to use and click on 'OK' button. In the 'destination URL' field you need to specify the address to which the visitor will be navigated to, if he/she clicks on the banner. Next is the 'Target' option in which you can specify that when the user clicks on the banner, the URL specified in the destination field will be opened on a new browser or not. The destination URL and Target are optional fields. Fill the necessary information such as 'Alt text', status text, comments, etc. Finally click on 'Save Changes'.

Under the Banner overview tab you can view detailed info about any ad like size, name, and even its preview

All set
After you have uploaded the banners, it's time to make use of them. Make sure that the banner size of the advertiser matches the zone size which is defined by the publisher else things will not work. For linking a particular banner to a publisher's zone navigate to inventory>Publisher & Zone> PCQuest (name of the publisher)>Zone Overview>My Zone >Linked banners and then from the drop down list choose PCQuest (advertiser) from the 'Select the campaign' option. Then select the campaign name that you gave for the chosen advertiser (in our case My Campaign) and click on blue arrow key, which finally links the ad to a zone. For testing this navigate to inventory> publishers & zone>PCQuest (publisher's name)>Invocation code and then click on 'copy to clipboard' provided on the right side of the page, make an index.html file on any Web server root folder, and paste the code into the index.html file. Now open this newly created Web page from any client machine, this shows you the ad that the publisher intends to display.

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