This guide takes you through the steps of serving your first ad campaign with OpenX.

There are three key stages we will go through:

• Firstly, you will load your first ad campaigns by setting up a new advertiser, ad campaign and then uploading a banner ad.

• Secondly, you will configure OpenX to display ads on your website by creating a publisher and zone, and then linking your ad campaign to your new zone.

• Finally, test the delivery of the ad campaign by loading an invocation tag into a html test page.

To keep things really simple, download the sample banner file to use for the tutorial.

Note: This tutorial skips most of the optional settings which you can learn about later.

Serving your First Ad

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Sample downloaded? Click here to Get Started… 1/13

Concepts: Advertisers & Campaigns

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Click here to Add new Advertiser…

Advertisers represent the person you are displaying the advertising for. They are also likely to be the people who supplied you with the banners to display.

A Campaign represents a set of banners ads and delivery properties. The campaign delivery properties controls include start and end dates, relative campaign priorities, frequency capping and delivery goals.

A banner is any creative content that is displayed as an ad. Banners can be in many file formats, including gif, jpg, png, swf (Flash), JavaScript, text, and HTML.

Pulling it all together: We will start by creating a new advertiser. Next, we will give that advertiser a campaign. Finally, we will load our image banner ad into the new campaign.

Within OpenX, advertisers own ad campaigns and supply the banners for each campaign.

Real world example:

Google Adsense

How would these terms apply to

a web publisher running Google

Adsense ad network ads?

Advertiser: “Google”

Ad campaign: “Google Adsense campaign”

Banner ad: The HTML tag generated

by Google Adsense.

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Done? Continue to Add new Campaign…

Did you know?

By setting up unique advertiser you

can generate performance reports

individually for each of Advertisers.

You can even give each

advertisers access to login and

access their own reports.

Add new Advertiser

In the Add new advertiser page, enter the

Name, Contact and Email for the advertiser. Skip

the other fields for this tutorial and click the Next

button at the bottom of the page.

In the Inventory > Advertisers & Campaigns

page, click the Add new advertiser link.

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Done? Continue to Add new Banner…

Add new Campaign

Did you know?Campaign properties can be used to

control when your ads are delivered.

This makes it easy to set start and

end dates for the campaign and to

spread out the delivery of impressions

over the lifetime of the campaign.

Real world example:

Direct ad sale

How would a publisher use a campaign

to run a campaign for a company,

CompanyX, who wanted to display advertising for their new movie only for the next month.

Advertiser: "CompanyX“

Ad campaign:  "July movie campaign" - set to expire on July 31st

Banner ad: A flash animation file

In the Add new

campaign page, enter

the Name for the

campaign. Skip the

other fields and click the

Save Changes button at

the end of the page.

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Done? Continue to Publishers & Zones…

Add new Banner

The Delivery options tab opens with the banner displayed above it. We’re not going to add any delivery limitations.

In the Banner overview tab, click the Add new

banner link.

In the Add new banner page:1.Select the Local banner (SQL) banner type.

2.Click Browse to select the banner to upload. Load the

image banner you downloaded on the first page of this

guide.

3.Enter http://www.example.com as the Destination URL.

4.In the Description field (not shown), enter My test banner

(the name of the banner). Skip the other fields and click

Save Changes.

Click the Inventory tab to be

ready for the next step of creating

a publisher.

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Done? Continue to Create a Publisher…

Publishers represent websites which you will be displaying advertising on. If you are managing the advertising for one website you will set up a single publisher to represent it.

A zone is the place on a website where ads will be displayed. It is typical to define a single zone which represents a common ad placement on all your web pages and other unique zones for special ad placements.

Within OpenX, publishers represent websites and zones define the places on a website where ads can be displayed. To display your ad campaign you will link it to one or more zones.

Pulling it all together: We will start by creating a publisher representing your website. Next, we will define a zone associated with this publisher. Finally, we will link your ad campaign to this zone.

To run the banner from your advertising campaign, you must link the banner to the zone.

Real world example: Typical blogger website

How would these terms apply to a typical blogger who plans to include ads in the sidebar of all pages and also to have a special feature ad on the homepage:

Publisher: “My Blog”

Zone 1: “Homepage feature”

Zone 2: “Run of site sitebar”

Concepts: Publishers & Zones

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Done? Continue to Create a Zone…

Create a Publisher

On the Add new publisher page. Complete the

basic information fields for the publisher. Skip

the rest of the fields and click Next.

In the Inventory > Publishers & Zones page, click

the Add new publisher link.

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Done? Continue to Linking campaign to a zone…

Create a Zone

Tips and tricks

In order to link a banner to a zone the sizes must match.

For example, only leaderboard banners can be linked to leaderboard zones.

In the Add new zone page:

Change the Name

Select the Banner zone type

Set the size to IAB Full Banner. Skip the other fields and click the Next button.

Skip the settings on the

Advanced tab and click

the Linked banners tab

to link your banner to

your zone.

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Done? Continue to Integrate into Web Pages…

Link Campaign to a Zone

Tips and tricks

In order to link a banner to a zone the sizes must match.

For example, only leaderboard banners can be linked to leaderboard zones.

In the Linked banners tab, select Link banners by

parent campaign and click the arrow.

Select your advertiser. The page refreshes with

another menu where you can select your

campaign. Click the arrow to continue.

Your campaign and banner appear in the list of

Campaigns linked to the zone.

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Done? Continue to Get a Tag for your Website…

The OpenX admin interface will generate an invocation tag suitable for your website. Typically, the HTML generated is pasted into the template you use for your web pages. In this way the same zone is included on many pages on your website.

To include ads on your website you will need to add some special HTML, called an invocation tag, into your website template.

Pulling it all together: We will start by generating an invocation tag for our zone and then create a simple webpage to test that ad delivery works.

Concepts: Integrate into Web Pages

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Did it work? Continue to Next Steps…

Get a Tag for your Website

In the Invocation code tab, select Javascript Tag from

the menu and click the arrow. The tag in the Bannercode

box is updated to a JavaScript tag.

Copy the tag from the Bannercode box and paste it into

your sample HTML page. In your browser, enter the URL of

the HTML page. The banner should appear on the page.If

this succeeds, paste the tag into your own HTML page and

see if it works.

Next Steps…

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Next steps…

Congratulations! You have successfully served your first ad campaign with OpenX.

Now that you have OpenX up and running you might like to:

• Create the zones you want to include in your website and then add the necessary invocation tags to your website templates.

• Create new advertisers and ad campaigns for the different sources of advertising you want to display on your website and link them to your website zones.

Want to learn more? The OpenX User Guide will help you get the most out of OpenX.

You might find it useful to start by reading about:

• Learn more about banner types and properties• Learn about targeting ads • Learn about frequency capping• Learn more about campaign delivery properties• Learn about statistics and reports