Thursday, January 10, 2008

Openads - A Real Life Example, Part 1

I recently setup Openads for Faves.com. Openads is a powerful ad server that lets your "take control of your advertising". You tell Openads about your inventory by defining zones, and you assign the appropriate advertising campaigns to these zones. You can then customize delivery to your heart's content by defining sophisticated rules.

While the documentation is reasonably good, I could not find a real life example. So, I am including our configuration, slightly simplified and modified, over my next few posts. Enjoy!

For this post, here is how Openads terminology maps to our scenario:

  • Advertiser: Google
    • Campaign: AdSense
      • Banner: 468x60
      • Banner: 728x90
  • Advertiser: Amazon
    • Campaign: Omakase
      • Banner: 468x60
      • Banner: 728x90
  • Advertiser: NetMediaGroup
    • Campaign: YourMusic.Com (Direct Ad Sale)
      • Banner: 468x60
      • Banner: 728x90
  • Publisher: Faves.com
    • Zone: 468x60 - Top
    • Zone: 728x90 - Top
    • Channel: shopping - Allows the publisher to request ads specifically targeted to shopping inventory.
    • Channel: nonshopping
In my next post, I will talk about delivery rules. These tell Openads when to show each of your banners.