Frequently Asked Questions - Features and functionality

There are several zone icon colors. Every color indicates a zone specific state.

Zone state can be any of:

- Banners linked to the zone,

- No banners linked to this Zone,

- Active E-mail/Newsletter zone,

- Inactive E-mail/Newsletter zone,

- Active Interstitial or Floating DHTML zone,

- Inactive Interstitial or Floating DHTML zone,

- Active Text zone,

- Inactive Text zone,

- Active Pop-Up zone,

- Inactive Pop-Up zone,

- Campaigns linked to the zone

Keywords are only used when using the 'direct selection' feature.

Direct selection is a way to manage delivery of your inventory without using publishers and zones. Read more here.

You can define multiple keywords for each banner and display them depending on the keywords used in the invocation code. Multiple keywords have to be separated by spaces.

You can assign one or more keywords to a banner and you can use the same keywords as a keyword statement. For example, if you assign the keyword "sports" to a banner, it will be considered for delivery if 'sports' is used in a keyword statement.

If the banner contains more than one keyword, for example 'sports', 'news' and 'science', any one of these keywords will identify the banner. Using only 'sports' will work, and so will using only 'news'.

An alternative way of defining a different content section of a website is the use of channels. Read more here.

Using OpenX you can easily rotate your website creatives without reloading your website each time.

When using the iFrame invocation you will be given options to set the time of rotation.

To automatically refresh a banner, specify the number of seconds between each reload. After each reload, a new banner from your zone is displayed.

It is difficult to estimate the performance of a typical ad server because it depends on so many factors.

Serving 10 million ads each month
A typical web server should be capable of serving 10 million impressions a month comfortably. If you are using a shared host this may limit what you are able to serve.

Serving 100 million ads each month
We know that many publishers serve over 100 million impressions a month using a dedicated web server and separate database server.

Serving billions of ads each month
To serve billions of impressions each month using typical server hardware requires sharing the ad serving load across several servers. OpenX has a feature called distributed statistics to help administer this.

You may well find that your ad server has more or less capacity based on your hardware, configuration and ad serving requirements. We encourage administrators to load test their their ad server to find their maximum capacity.

Flash objects need to be given a parameter like '<param NAME="wmode" VALUE="transparent">' in order to help properly appear behind a dHTML menu or ajax popup (lightbox, for example).

To add this parameter to a Flash Banner in OpenX:

1. Add the flash file into OpenX as a Local Webserver banner

2. After adding the banner, go back to the main banner properties. There will now be an additional field called "Transparent background" -- set this to Yes and submit the form.

Yes! In fact, this is by far the most popular ad network used by OpenX publishers.

To display Google AdSense ads use a ‘HTML banner’ and paste in the ad tag given to you by Google.

There is an extra step required to track clicks. When setting up your banner enable 'Alter HTML to enable tracking of Clicks' and select 'Rich Media - Google AdSense' from the list.

We've created a tutorial to help you set up your Google AdSense ad campaign in OpenX

Also, if you’re new to OpenX you might like to follow our how to guide on serving your first ad campaign to follow through the process of setting up your first advertiser (Google), ad campaign (AdSense campaign) and banner (the Google AdSense ad itself).

Note: AdSense doesn't officially support click tracking. OpenX will always be able to track impressions and does have a way to track clicks using Javascript (see above). However, if AdSense serves a flash banner or serves a banner which is designated to open in a new window, OpenX will not be able to track these clicks. Since AdSense does not officially support click tracking, it is not something we can change.

Yes, this is exactly what OpenX is for - to make your life as a publisher, easier!

Yes, however it depends exactly what kind of banners you want to deliver and what technology the mobile devices you are targeting will support

The simple solution is to treat a mobile device like an email -- assume that it won't support your javascript code or advanced html.

In this sense, create a zone as an Email zone. Assign 1 active Image banner to it. Generate the cookieless image tag, and this will display on your mobile device.

Yes - when creating a zone you should use the Zone Type 'email' - which requires that only 1 active banner is linked to that zone.

The option you want to enable is the 'Companion Positioning' option on the main Campaign Properties page.

This way, if there are 2+ zones on a page and a zone loads a banner from a companion positioned (roadblocked)campaign, the following zones will try and load a banner from that same campaign, if one is assigned and available for the zone. The zones will not load a banner from a different campaign.

This feature requires context-sensitive invocation tags - which means any tag will work except for IMG or iFrame tags.

From OpenX 2.8 the feature requires to use a Single Page Call tags.

You can use also a Java Script tags, however if a first zone delivers a non companion banner OpenX will not guarantee to deliver a non companion banner in other zones. The feature will work only when companion banner is loaded for the first zone on the page.