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Open Ads - Open Source Ad Inventory Management
The Big List of Affiliate Marketing Events
Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

I downloaded and installed OpenAds yesterday. If you are running any sort of advertising on your website, this is a good tool to consider adding to your arsenal. You know that there’s more good things coming because they recently secured $5 million of funding. Plus, they have about 25,000 publishers using their software so it’s likely that they’re going to be around for a while. I have installed the previous incarnation of OpenAds which existed as phpAdsNew but it looks like the new is now old.

The installation was simple. You just have to make sure that your server has all the required versions of MySQL (4.0.18) and PHP (4.3.11). To check your version of php, create a file using a rext editor with the following line and save it as phpinfo.php:

< ? phpinfo(); ?>

Run the file by typing http://www.yourdomain.com/phpinfo.php and you will see the version of PHP installed on your server.

You can check the MySQL version on your server by going into your control panel and looking at the server information. On some servers, you might see the PHP version there as well.

Anyway, a word of caution. I’m not sure if this is unique only to my case. But I had some trouble during the installation process. When I finished the installation (which is a 5 or 6 step process), I couldn’t log in to the admin area using the username and password I had supplied. I was using FireFox and suspected that sometimes weird things happen with compatibility issues, so I erased the config files and started the installation over again using IE7 and it went through just fine.

Apart from that little hitch, the rest of the installation process was easy (you’re given step by step instructions along the way). There’s also lots of documentation available at the OpenAds website.

Rotate Banners Easily

OpenAds allows you to rotate through an inventory of ads in a given timeframe or you can specify the number of impressions or clickthroughs. This lets you split test different ads and select the best performing ones. It simplifies banner rotation and lets you add creatives from different ad networks into your rotation. For example, you can split test between AzoogleAds and NeverBlue. Often times, different ad networks can have the same CPA offer with different landing pages so that is something that you can split test.

Easy Management of Ads In Your Empire

For those of us that have a large network of sites, this tool makes it easy to manage ad serving across different websites. You just have to place the code once on the site and then you can manage the ads all in one place through a single admin panel. That makes life a whole lot easier.

I wanted to bring OpenAds to your attention in case you haven’t heard of it. I will write more about it in the future as I start to really delve into all the functionality it offers.

Technorati Tags: OpenAds, ad management tool, banner rotation

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