As a blogger with numerous sites on the internet I have a wealth of experience on managing content and the like across multiple sites. I therefore wanted to do a short post on how I manage one aspect of this which is managing blog advertising.
The best program I have found thus far for managing blog advertising is the OpenX advertisement management platform.
When I began using OpenX I believe it was only available as a self-hosted version however in more recent times the Free OpenX Community Hosted version has been released. For those of you that are expecting less than 100 million ad impressions per month (which I am expecting to be 99.9999% of the people that will ever see or read this post) the OpenX Community Hosted version will probably suffice. Personally I host OpenX myself as I have a pet hate about being too reliant on other services for my site to operate as well as the fact I have always hosted it myself… but it is entirely up to you.
Essentially OpenX allows you to add numerous websites, advertisers, advertising campaings, and banners (a.k.a ads) into the system and manage the links between all of these. If you have a single blog it is probably somewhat more complex than you might need but when more than one blog comes into play I have found it to be of great assistance. OpenX manages all of these aspects in the background and in turn requires only a single section of code to be inserted for each place you wish an ad to display, the handy thing here is that when the ads change the code on your site does not have to.
OpenX Has Allowed Me To:
- Consolidate all my advertising across three blogs and two galleries into a single location.
- Manage advertising campaigns from various affiliate programs (including the ability to set expiration dates).
- See detailed statistics such as how often banners are displayed, and the effectiveness of each (such as click-through rates).
- Run specific campaigns at certain times. One example being the ability to override all other ads with a campaign that may be holiday related or related to a specific post on the blog (as an example).
- Rotate multiple ads across a single location on a site.
- Change advertisements without having to change the code on my site.
Some things to be aware of:
- In the case of the self hosted version, can take a bit of work to set up.
- It is designed as an enterprise solution so can be pretty much as flexible (complex) as you would like it to be.
- If you are using it across multiple sites (and using the self-hosted version) you may want an additional central domain to run it from. That way the installation is not dependent on any one of your domains so if one site gets shut down in future OpenX is still hosted on a separate domain.
So… that is just a quick and dirty on what I use for advertising management. If you have multiple sites I would highly recommend you at least take a look at OpenX and how it works as it may save you a lot of hassle and time later down the track.
I welcome your thoughts, what are your experiences… or do you have any questions you might like to ask?
Stuart
