Lately I got to a point where I was serving ads from various sources such as Google AdSense, Copeac, Commission Junction and a few others. I wanted these ads to share some common advertising spaces on my web pages so I wrote a little ad rotator. But then again it wasn’t perfect cause I needed to track clicks and impressions. So I decided to use Openads to handle the task and it worked like a charm. Openads allows you to deliver ads based on various criteria such as geotargeting, language, day of the week, etc.
Openads is a free adserver written in PHP and using a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. At this point, there are two versions available: 2.0 and 2.3 beta. You can get a comparison chart at http://www.openads.org/products/choosing-your-adserver-solution.html. The beta version offers a lot of additional features which I didn’t have time to experiment yet so that’s what we’re going to install today.
First of all, when I set up an ad server, I like to have a distinctive subdomain but this is optional. Also, I prefer using a distinctive database in order to be able to import, export or backup data for that particular application only. So for this tutorial, I suggest you start by creating an additional subdomain and a new MySQL or PostgreSQL database. I will not go into details about this; I’m assuming you know how to do it.
That being said, grab a copy of Openads 2.3 beta at http://www.openads.org/downloads. Unzip the content on your hard drive and upload it to your web server where you want Openads to be (i.e.: the newly created subdomain or a subdirectory of your main domain like http://www.mydomain.com/ads).
Next, use a web browser to visit the URL which contains Openads. Go through the setup wizard and fill the required fields. You may have to adjust permissions on some directories.
Now the last thing you have to do is to setup an automated maintenance task to run every hour through cron (Linux) or scheduled tasks (Windows) :
[path to php]/php -q [path to Openads]/scripts/maintenance/maintenance.php www.example.com
That’s about it for the installation.
Now I do not want to give access to advertisers nor publishers so I will act as both when managing the inventory. Stay tuned for my next post on how I proceed.
August 29th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Hi,
Thanks for the kind words, I’m glad you enjoy our work!
A small tip: If using subdomains, it helps to not use a common word like ‘ads’ because adblockers commonly block ‘ads.*.com’ etc. Of course, we don’t want to sneak ads onto users who don’t want them, but its always best to not invite attention.
Openads 2.3 also lets you customize the delivery filenames so that if ‘adclick.php’ is blocked by a software, you can customize it to ‘recommend.php’ or whatever you wish.
Thanks,
Arlen Coupland
Openads.org
August 29th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Thanks for the great tip Arlen! The post has been edited.