An interesting thing happened last week. We realized that Openx 2.8.5 is available for download, though there was no official announcement about it. The home page on OpenX website still shows that OpenX 2.8.4 is available for download, though we were able to download OpenX 2.8.5.

Our server support team went ahead and downloaded the latest version, ran it through our usual ‘New Downloads Review’ process and after verfiying it, approved it as ‘Ready for Production Use’. Based on this verification, late last week we have now installed it on our ad server and have not seen any visible issues with it. We will continue to monitor this latest version and see how it performs.

In any case, we are still wondering why OpenX have forgotten to announce the availability of v2.8.5.

We tried approaching different people, including OpenX forums, third party freelance sites, etc. A consistent answer we received was, if the third party advertiser does not support the extra parameter in their ad code, there is no way to capture the clicks from their ads. We were puzzled at realizing that such a simple requirement might not be handled in OpenX.

Very interestingly, someone from OpenX Services wrote to me a few days after the last post was published, saying that they could solve this problem for us.

So I had written back to them asking for the next steps to be taken to proceed with this. I am yet to hear from them.

Meanwhile, I started thinking to myself, if someone at OpenX Services says that they can solve this for us, then definitely it is something that is possible with OpenX with some custom coding/fine tuning. As I started thinking more about the alternative ways of solving this, a very rudimentary solution came to my mind where I did the following steps:

1. Created an advertiser (lets call this A1), a campaign and a banner in which I posted the tag from the non-supported third party into it.
2. Created a publisher (lets call this P1) and set up a zone for this publisher. Linked the banner created in step 1 and generated the ad tag from Auro Ads for P1.
3. Created another advertiser (say A2), setup a campaign and a banner. In this banner, I posted the tag from P1 and set it to ‘OpenX’ as the HTML provider.
4. Created another publisher (say P2) and setup a zone for this publisher, linked the banner from A1 and generated the ad tag.
5. Posted the ad tag for P2 in a test page.

The ad correctly showed up from A1, but when I clicked it, the Auro Ads system did not capture the click.

So at this point, this issue is still not solved, but we are at least sure that there is a way to solve it – because the OpenX services team believes there is. So we are going to keep trying out alternative solutions and will provide an update on this.

There are quite a few good features announced, but all of them listed so far, appear to be related mainly to OpenX Market integration – not a bad idea though.

For those of who, who are not familiar with OpenX, it started as an independent open source community project and went through many name changes before it became OpenX. Around this time, it got good funding from venture capitalists and now they are trying to make the product better as well as make it revenue generating by using alternate ideas such as offering consulting services, a hosted version, etc.

In this version 2.8.4, some of the key non-OpenX market related features are:

• Easier upgrade options using a simpler navigation scheme
• New Inventory Setup Wizard, to help you easily setup and manage your advertisers and publishers

Some of the OpenX market related features are:

• Setting a minimum CPM above which ads can be served from the OpenX market. This will allow the system to serve ads from OpenX market, if it gives ads at a better CPM than the minimum CPM set in the system.
• Creating and managing campaigns for the ads served from OpenX market.
• Allowing OpenX market to serve the ads if there are blank ads shown.
• Easier view of the statistics collected from the ads served by OpenX market.

All these features appear to be very promising, but this release clearly shows the trend in which OpenX is progressing, ie. investing more and more of their time towards promoting the growth of the OpenX Market.

We have seen the pattern in the past on such projects, where when a open source project takes a deviation from its original core goal, a new fork version comes, which continues to go down the path of the original goal. Lets see how this one goes.

Two interesting things happened yesterday:

1. We upgraded to the latest version of OpenX (2.8.3)
2. We also moved our adserver to a new server.

Right after these changes, the statistics stopped getting captured.

We initially thought we had messed up something during the migration and so we tried to fix it by copying the database over again, clearing the cache file, etc. Still the statistics were not getting captured.

During this research, we also noticed that ‘Invocation Code’ link under Zones was having some issue (the drop down that usually shows Javascript/Iframe options had no options in it). So we were unable to get any ad code also. At this time, we started getting a feeling if something was wrong with the newest version of OpenX.

In order to isolate the issue, we took a brand new version of OpenX and installed it on a new server. We noticed that in this brand new installation also the Javascript/Iframe options was missing in the invocation code.

At this point, we strongly believed this has to do with the new version and so we are reverted back to the old version and immediately our statistics started working.

Based on these facts so far, we are now running on 2.8.2 itself – and we dont intend to upgrade to 2.8.3 unless we get to the bottom of the issue and identify the exact cause of the issue that troubled us a lot this week.

Will keep you updated on this.

We are looking for OpenX experts to help us with this. Please find below our requirements with the details of the issue. If you feel you could be of any assistance, please feel free to reply.

This is a very quick task for a OpenX expert as it should not take much time for an OpenX expert to solve this.

We have OpenX installed on one of our servers.

1. We have created a new advertiser, a new campaign under this advertiser and a new banner as ‘OpenX Generic HTML Banner’. The following is a sample code of this banner:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
var guruji_ad_client = “gu12345678″;
var guruji_ad_id = “123″;
var guruji_ad_type = “2″;
var guruji_ad_bgcolor = “FFFFFF”;
var guruji_ad_tcolor = “000000″;
var guruji_ad_dcolor = “000099″;
var guruji_ad_ucolor = “000000″;
var guruji_ad_keyword = “movies”;
var guruji_ad_width=”728″;
var guruji_ad_height=”90″;
var guruji_ad_language =”1″;
var guruji_ad_contentType =”3″;
var guruji_ad_open =”1″;
–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://adguru.guruji.com/scripts/show_ads.js”></script>

2. We are able to track the clicks for known providers, but are not able to track the click for this ‘unknown provider’ listed above. OpenX recommends using magic macros to solve this.

We are looking for an OpenX expert to help us with the solution to this.

The success of this task will result in clicks correctly captured in the OpenX statistics for this ad.

If you feel you are experienced in setting this up, please bid on this task. If you have any questions on this, please feel free to ask.

If you do not have previous experience with OpenX please do not bid.

For a person experienced with OpenX this should be a easy task, and we have many more such tasks in mind in the future as our ad serving is increasing on OpenX platform.

Regards,

Admin

At Auro Infotech, we have been using OpenX for over three years during which it has evolved from phpAdsNew to OpenAds to OpenX. We also have an internal advertising platform called Auro Ads which aims to solve a long pending need in the online advertising platform in India ie. the lack of a reliable ad network that will do justice both to the publishers and advertisers. During this process, we learnt a lot about this open source product, its strengths, its limitations and workarounds.

Typically in an ad network you would expect the ability for advertisers and publishers to be able to register automatically and login. OpenX (as of today – 31-Jul-2009) does not have this functionality integrated into it. We came up with a way to build our own advertiser registration page and a publisher registration page, which will store information separately, validate it and then add it to the master ad network so that they can access the system easily.

For one of our clients, we added a new banner type (not available in OpenX) to be available for their publishers and advertisers.

Another requirement is the ability to manage the background color of the campaign and the banner. While we have been able to successfully integrate the feature to manage background colour of a campaign, we have not yet been able to give the same feature for managing background colour of the banner. We hope to be able to accomplish this within the next week or so.

We are looking forward to wrapping up this version and also work on the next features which be quite challenging (such as integrating video ads in OpenX, etc). Will keep you updated on these exciting changes happening in August 2009.

If you have any OpenX related requirement or any question about OpenX, please feel free to ask.

Regards