OpenX, the freely available ad server management system is a great product – of that we’re in absolutely no doubt. Innovations, such as the creation of the OpenX Marketplace and a recently announced strategic alliance with Microsoft add to what is already a great solution for publishers who want to take control of monetising their own inventory.

There are of course products out there to rival it – like DoubleClick/Google Dart – but the ease of entry for OpenX makes it an obvious starting point.

For the last 18 months we’ve been running OpenX on our own server. We’re yet to upgrade to version 2.8, which is required for Marketplace – and once we’re there I’ll be interested to see how broad the marketplace is. I expect that it’ll be heavily skewed towards US advertisers – Marketplace is only really going to work for our clients if it can credibly compete on a local level with Google – notwithstanding OpenX’s ability to work with Google Adsense anyway – and for that it will need UK advertisers in its marketplace.

If you’re thinking of using OpenX for your business, what route should you go. OpenX offers 3 options – a free Community Hosted, Enterprise Hosted and then the option to install the software on your own box and go Community Download.

A few months ago we thought we saw an opportunity to migrate from Community Download to Community Hosted. The benefits seemed obvious:-

Plenty of ad impressions

Free Hosted offers a 100 million ad impressions per month. You only need to pay (by virtue of moving to Open X Enterprise Hosted) if you need to exceed this – the idea being I guess, if your level of ad impressions isn’t generating the cost of the monthly fees (which start at $999) then you’re doing something wrong.

Enterprise does offer telephone support as part of the contract – the only version that offers any structured support beyond the forums.

No need to worry about version upgrades or your own server management

An appealing benefit to us at the time was that using Community Hosted meant that we didn’t need to upgrade our server’s OS to facilitate an upgrade from PHP 5.1.2 to PHP 5.2 to make the move from OpenX 2.6 to 2.8. While the free hosted version makes no guarantee of uptime, we logically reasoned that OpenX hosting their own software should be able to make a better fist of it than us (not that we’ve ever had problems ourselves)

The reality was somewhat different…

Communication

When problems occur with OpenX Community Hosted, you need to go to the site and find out the status yourself. Which means, if problems occur, you’ve usually been alerted to it by your client, not your service provider (aka OpenX) which is not ideal.

Support

The only support comes via documentation and the forums. From time to time OpenX staff or super-users will chip in, but there’s no reliable structured support – or even the option to buy in as a premium service, unless you go Enterprise.

Time Zone

The bulk of Community Hosted seems to be managed on the US west coast. The timezone has two impacts. If problems arise, in the UK, you’re on your own till 4pm. Often, from 4pm, the admin tools can be hard to get continual access to because of demand. I have to say, both of these observations are anecdotal.

The conclusion we’ve reached

We’ve now gone back to deciding the best way for us to use OpenX is to go the Community Download route – even though that means we’ve got to do a fair amount of work on a server upgrade to get there. Businesses can run OpenX on a dedicated server, with regular back ups, for a cost of £150 month plus whatever admin time needs to be costed, to a service level of at least 99.5% uptime. This is significantly cheaper than a starting price of $999 per month, for an extra 0.25% guaranteed uptime and support for going with Enterprise Hosted.

The downside is of course that you’re taking on support and liability for a product that ultimately you don’t control – but the experience from using either Hosted version versus Community Download is at least the latter is one you can set your own internal SLAs around with your clients.

With a community of over 50,000 publishers its easy to see what OpenX are struggling to maintain support of the Community Hosted version – but they should remember that, for many people, this route will be their first experience of the solution. After our experience of Community Hosted, I’m not sure I’d trust OpenX to provide me with decent service for Enterprise, even though I guess this is where all their resource goes. OpenX would do well in my opinion to take a leaf out of WordPress’s book with regards to offering a hosted and downloadable product side by side.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

In the fight for credit crunch business, grabbing the attention of your target audience can be extremely difficult. To paraphrase Alick in his previous post – A website is just the beginning – you can’t just hope for online business to find you.

The solution? An integrated business blog and subscribable RSS feed, like our very own miggleblog. An inexpensive, simple tool, it can give you direct access to millions of prospective customers worldwide.

The benefits of a blog:

Reach more people, and make money
The likelihood is that only your existing customers will read a news section on your website. With a blog you can reach out and find new prospects. Google’s Feedburner is an invaluable tool that can help you publicise your RSS feed content and make it easier for people to subscribe. By participating in the FeedBurner Ad Network, you can make money from your pearls of wisdom.

Build customer relations
It’s far harder to get business from new customers than it is to get more business from your existing customers, so keeping in touch should be one of your top priorities. An interactive blog is a friendly and fun way to keep your existing customers up-to-date with all your new offers and products, so that your business will be at the forefront of their mind when they need your products or services again.

Better search engine rankings
The migglemedia team always recommend that a business blog be hosted on the main business website, as the more people that read your blog and link to posts on it, the higher your website will appear in the search engine rankings.

Bring in more traffic
Google search loves frequently updated websites, therefore a blog can bring in a surprising amount of new traffic to your website through natural search terms. Blog posts are rapidly indexed by the major search engines and can be extremely profitable.

Start a buzz
Blog about your new products, drop hints about forthcoming events, publicise your research – grab the attention of the press! Blogs are increasingly quoted and cited in the mainstream media, and as such are a great way to score free publicity for your company.

Become ‘the guru’
If your business occupies a niche sector of the market, why not share your knowledge via a blog and build a reputation as a go-to person?

Test your ideas
Thinking about a change of direction for the company or expanding into a new range of products? Blog about it and let your customers tell you exactly what they want from your business.

>> How to profit from social media

>> Drive user engagement with a newsletter

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Internet advertising in Britain was the only ad medium to grow in 2008, rising 17 percent and bucking the overall 3.5 percent industry fall, according to the latest reports.

The reasons? Pay-per-click and online display advertising offer businesses what TV, radio, mail and press simply can’t – total accountability, the flexibility to adjust and test advertising messages in real time and pinpoint targeting of your desired audiences.

There are millions of places on the internet where you can buy advertising and lots of different ways you can do it. Advertising comes down to two things – you’re either building your brand or you want to elicit some direct response. There are distinct strategies for both.

In terms of building brand – it’s important to establish what kind of websites have a commercial offering that’s right for you and a relevant audience. You could buy an ad on the front page of Yahoo! and reach many millions of people from all walks of life – it’ll be priced accordingly. But you may find that there are websites that cost less and work better, helping you to access a relevant niche audience.

The migglemedia team can advise you on where you should advertise, what your mix of branded and direct spend should be, bargain advertising opportunities and how to design compelling creative.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Once you’ve taken the decision to sell advertising space on your website to other businesses, there are some important issues to consider:

Brand
Can you sell to advertisers who will provide creative that can do justice to your brand? To safeguard your brand values, you will need to decide what you will allow an advertiser to feature on your network.

Selling
Who will be selling your inventory (advertising space)? What’s your revenue target going to be and what levels of CPMs and % sell-throughs do you need to reach to achieve this? How do your sales team derive prices for your various offerings? What are your costs of sales – and what is your profit margin going to be on your inventory?

Inventory
How will you predict future levels of page views and users? Where are the highest value areas for selling display advertising on your site and what is your strategy for dealing with the high value inventory versus the low value inventory? (The answers to these will also help shape where you might integrate Google text ads or banner inventory sold by third party adservers.) How will you deal with auditing ad delivery and charging clients?

Audience
To what extent (and how/when) will you segment your audience on the site to potentially target advertising?

Sales Programmes
What’s your sales programme going to be? (i.e. what do you sell, and where?) What creative formats will you host on your site? Video/Flash/JPG, IAB or non IAB formats?

Scheduling
Who will manage acquisition of creative from the client and schedule the creative on the OpenX server?

Reporting
What information from OpenX will you make available to clients – and will you allow them access to the system to get this information themselves? Who in your business will monitor both the success of house and client campaigns as well as review the effectiveness of the overall sales programme you settle on?

Contract
What contractual agreements will you enter into with your advertisers? How will you cover yourself against service outages and under deliveries? In your whole ad sales process what are the points of failure and what risks do these present to your business? How do you mitigate these?

Find out more:
> Online display advertising

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Art Review: display advertising served via Open X

Introducing OpenX – amongst other things…

For high traffic pages on my website, I would look at how I could sell these myself. In this respect OpenX is a great service for managing your own advertising inventory. A self contained, stand alone management system, it generates code to drop into your web pages to manage the display of advertising.

A solution such as OpenX gives you the power to manage campaigns you sell yourself, which means you can set your own rules as to what type of creative you’ll display and who you’ll sell to. You can also use OpenX to manage your own internal promotions and start to track how effective these are. The experience you get from this could be invaluable for when you decide you want to buy banner advertising on other sites.

migglemedia are now running an OpenX installation and can set up you up with full access to the system.

Finally, don’t just use any old size ad on your site. Use IAB Universal ad package sized formats that are easy to incorporate into site designs. If you make up your own sizes, and then you want to sell your ad space to clients, they’ll have to create special versions just for your site. Which doesn’t make sense. You can find out more about the IAB ad standards here.

If you’d like to talk more about how to best monetise your sites, or to find out more about our experiences with OpenX, feel free to get in touch with me at migglemedia.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.