This tutorial will help you getting started with Openads v2.x. If you haven’t already installed Openads, I suggest you read my previous post on the subject.

Let me explain how Openads works, at least for what I understand about it. There are three types of accounts in Openads : administrator, advertiser and publisher.

Different Access Types

The Administrator Account
When you log in as the administrator, you have access to both advertiser and publisher functionalities as well as some administrative settings.

The Advertiser Account
Depending on which rights you give to the advertisers, they can access their statistics, reports and campaigns. They can modify, activate and deactivate their banners but they cannot create new ones or delete existing banners.

The Publisher Account
Publisher can also access statistics and reports. They can manage their zones and select which banners are to appear in which zones (more about this later). Publishers can create, delete or modify existing zones.

So to resume this:

• The administrator has full access to Openads
• The advertisers can modify, activate or deactivate existing banners but they can’t create new ones or delete them. Banner creation or deletion needs to be done by the administrator. Advertisers also have access to statistics and reports.
• The publishers can create new zones and modify or delete them. They can also decide which banners will appear in their zones. They also have access to statistics and reports.

Managing The Inventory

Sometimes you don’t necessarily want to give access to your ad server to advertisers nor publishers. For example, you may want to display Google AdSense ads on your website. In that case, you don’t want to give an access to the Google AdSense staff, you just want to be able to make your AdSense code available from your Openads server. You may also be the only publisher using this ad server so a publisher access is not required. In this case, you are acting as both the advertiser and the publisher at the same time.

Adding Banners To The Inventory

For this example, we want to serve Google AdSense ads through Openads.

Ok so right now, log in as the administrator if you haven’t already done so. Select the “Inventory” tab, click on “Advertisers & Campaigns” and then on “Add new advertiser”.

We are going to create an advertiser account for Google (keep in mind the idea is not to have the Google staff logging in and managing the ads, we want to do that ourself and they probably don’t care about your ad server anyway).

So let’s fill the required fields for the new user account:

Note that I entered my name and email address because I will be managing this advertiser account myself. I’ve also set the number of days between campaign delivery reports to “1” day because I like to have a report sent to me by email everyday. I didn’t give any permissions to this account because I will never have to log in as “google”; I will always use the administrator account.

Click on “Next” to create this new account.

So now you should have a new advertiser named “Google”. You should now be have the “Add a new campaign” form displayed. Let’s create a campaign named “AdSense” for this advertiser.

We won’t go into specific details here. Just enter “AdSense” as the campaign name and click “Save Changes”. You are then taken to the “Linked zones” tab. We haven’t created any zones yet so we’ll just add a banner which will be linked to a zone a little later.

Click on the “Banner overview” tab and then click on “Add new banner”:

Now select the HTML banner type. Go get your AdSense code for, let’s say, a 336×280 text ad. I will not go into details about using Google AdSense though. Now paste your code into the text area.

You can check “Alter HTML to enable tracking of Clicks” although this feature isn’t really useful for AdSense ads. Do not change the destination URL as this is set by the Google ad code. Set the size of the banner (336×280) and enter a description. Click on “Save Changes”.

We’re now done adding a new banner to our inventory. Now we need to add a publisher and a zone to which our new banner will be linked. Click on the “Inventory” tab and then select “Publishers & Zones”. Click on the “Add new publisher” link near the top.

Now enter the information about the website you wish to display ads on.

Again we won’t set any specific settings or permissions as we will always use the administrator account anyway. Click on “Next” to add the new publisher to the inventory. You are then taken to the “Add new zone” form.

A zone is a space or an area on your web page where you want to display ads. A zone has to be defined by it’s size so that only banners that fits this area are being displayed there. For example, look at the top right corner of TheWebmastersCafe.net. You see a 468×60 ad. It is being displayed in a zone I named “Top right corner – 468×60” in Openads.

So let’s say we want to display ads that will blend with our web page’s main content. We will create a 336×280 zone we will name “TheWebmastersCafe.net – Content – 336×280”. I try to use relevant names as I may have several banners someday.

Click on “Next” when you’re done.

You now need to select which banners are to appear in this zone (we actually have only one banner of course). Click on the “Linked banners” tab and select “Link individual banners”. Select “Google” from the advertiser list and “AdSense” from the available campaigns. We only got one banner so select “Google AdSense – Blue title – 336×280”. Now click on the little blue arrow to link this banner to our newly created zone.

Great! We’re almost done! We got all we need in our inventory, all that’s left to do is add the invocation code to our web page. Click on the “Invocation code” tab.

If your web page is written in PHP and resides on the same web server as your Openads installation, you may select “Local Mode Tag” (although you may encounter some problems related to an open_basedir restriction in effect). If you are unsure about this, select “Javascript Tag”. Now simply copy the banner code and paste it into your web page where you want the ad to appear.

You now have a Google AdSense ad served by Openads on your website!

Of course there are different types of invocation codes you may want to try out. The Javascript tag may slow down the access to your web page so I suggest you read more on the subject and try out some different invocation types.

There is a lot more to Openads than this but it’s a good start.

Good luck!

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