Delivery limitations

To set delivery limitations, in the Banner Properties > Delivery Options tab, select the limitation you want from the drop-down menu. You can limit banner delivery based on:

• Site
• Geography
• Time
• Client

You can combine delivery limitations to target your ads even more effectively.

Targeting by site

You can target ads based on the visitor website in a number of ways:

• Target by Page URL to show the ad to visitors to one specific page.
• Target by Referrer URL to show an ad to all visitors who came from the same referring page (for example, because the page has a hyperlink to the ad request page.
• Target by Channel (or section) of a website. You must set up at least one channel to be able to use this targeting option.
  Refer to Channels for more information.
• Target by Variable to deliver an ad to any page request that contains a specified variable.

See also: Channels

Geotargeting

With geotargeting, you can target ads to visitors from a specific location. Geotargeting uses a GeoIP database from MaxMind. OpenX can check the IP address of a visitor against this database to determine the visitor’s location. MaxMind provide a free database that targets by country or continent and you can buy additional databases to target more specifically, for example by city or ISP.

To enable free geotargeting, in the Main Settings page, select the Geotargeting Settings option from the drop-down menu and click the arrow. Select MaxMind GeoIP as the Geotargeting Module Type. This option automatically enables the free version of the MaxMind GeoIP database and the Geo - Continent and Geo - Country options appear in the menu of delivery limitations.

Visit the MaxMind website to learn more about GeoIP databases.

Targeting by time

Traffic patterns to your website probably vary a lot depending on the hour of the day and day of the week. You can use delivery limitations to:

• Target an ad to appear on a specific day or days, for example for a special promotion.
• Target an ad to appear at particular hours in a day when your visitors are more likely to respond to an ad, for example to advertise a breakfast cereal early in the morning.
• Target an ad to appear on a specific day, or days of the week, for example to advertise an entertainment venue on the days of regular events.

Targeting by client

When a visitor requests an ad, information about the visitor’s client is passed with the request. You can use this information to:

• Target an ad to visitors in their own language, making it possible to serve different language versions of an ad for localised websites.
• Target an ad to a specific domain, for example you could have one ad for visitors from the New York Times and another ad for visitors from the Washington Post.
• Target an ad based on the IP address of the visitor. Blocks of IP addresses are assigned to ISPs and you can specify a range of IP addresses to target an ad to customers of a specific ISP.
• Target by user agent, for example to show different versions of an ad for different browsers or operating systems.