Note: This is not a sponsored post. I have just been using OpenAds (phpAdsNew) for years and think that every publisher should be aware of and know how to use it.

Private ad sales are by far the largest revenue generator for this blog to date. The beauty of selling your own ads in-house is that you cut out commission that third party services, such as AdVolcano, charge per sale. Of course these services sometimes have access to advertisers that you may not be able to get in contact with, and there are other pros and cons as well (but lets save that for another article).

Most of you are probably already aware of the benefits of selling your own ads privately, but do you know the best way to manage those ads? I can’t guarantee that I have the best solution for private ad management, but I’ve used a program that has worked for me for a number of years.

OpenAds (previously known as phpAdsNew) is a free ad management software and one that I have used since I started selling private ads. Some of the benefits of this program are:

• Advertiser management
• Campaign management
• Banner management
• Zone management
• Precise campaign tracking
• Login system (allows advertisers to track their own campaigns)

Advertiser management in OpenAds allows you to add, remove, and modify advertisers dynamically and with great ease. It also gives you the ability to manage not one, but multiple campaigns for each advertiser as well as upload respective banners. You then can create specific zones on your site to display these ads which can be tracked within the system (by you or your customer). Easy right?

The main problem with OpenAds is the learning curve. It’s fairly steep. In addition, I haven’t been impressed with their support documents which is why I’m going to give a very brief breakdown of how to setup an advertising campaign through OpenAds on your site.

Step 1. Setup a Publisher & Zone
The first thing you need to do is set your website up as a “publisher”. Go to Inventory > Publishers & Zones and then click on “Add new publisher”. In this field you just put in your website information and your own contact information. This part is a bit confusing because when you’re setting up ads for your own site it’s sort of weird to create another login for yourself. But you have to keep in mind that this program is setup to manage an unlimited number of advertisers and publishers. In this case, however, you’re the only publisher.

Once you have created yourself as a publisher, you continue to “Zone overview” and “Ad new zone”. This part is simple – I’ve setup 2 zones for NBB: one for the top banner and one for the sidebar block. Once you have setup the zone you need to copy and paste the code found in the “invocation code” into your website template.

Step 2. Setup an Advertiser
Go back to Inventory and click on “Advertisers & Campaigns” and then continue to “Add new advertiser”. If you haven’t actually sold any ad spaces yet for your respective advertising blocks just create one to show your default ads (ie. affiliate banners like I have above). I named mine “Default Ads” – again put in your own information here.

If and when you do sell an advertiser spot, however, this is where you would put in the information of your advertiser. It is important that you put in all of their information correctly to make sure it is easy to manage. You also want to double check the email because OpenAds automatically sends email updates to advertisers with click reports and warnings that their spots are going to expire.

Step 3. Setup a Campaign
After you’ve setup an advertiser go into the advertiser’s page and click “Campaign overview”. This is where you add in the actual banner ad that you want to appear on your site. Simply click “Add new campaign” and put in the information. You then go on to upload the banner, set the URL, and assign it to a “zone” (which is the actual location on your website as mentioned earlier).

An important thing to note here is at the bottom of “Campaign properties” where it says “Campaign weight: 1″. If you are doing as I am, for example, and displaying 5 rotating banners in your ad zone you would have 5 banners all set to a campaign weight of 1. If you sold say 3 banner spots (in the rotating zone) to one individual who wanted to run one banner then you would only need to change the weight of their campaign rather than adding the same campaign two more times. So where it says campaign weight you would change it to 3 while leaving the other 2 banners in the zone at 1. Make sense?

Now you have setup your own banner advertising campaign. Easy right? I can’t tell you how long it took me to setup my first campaign with OpenAds. I’m not exactly tech-savvy, and neither are a lot of publishers. After all, content is king, not the ability to quickly grasp software right?

One last response to a question I’ve been asked about OpenAds before I finish up: Why should I bother with all this OpenAds stuff when I can just hard code a PHP rotater script into my site? A couple reasons:

Tracking – It’s always good to provide your advertisers with up-to-date and accurate tracking. The easier you make it for them to collect information the better chance you have that they’re going to renew their subscription next month.

Ease of Management – I know it might seem like a bit of work to get OpenAds up and running on your site, but trust me once it’s up it will make managing private advertisers so much easier. After everything is operational it should only take you 5 minutes max to add a new advertiser.

Automation – OpenAds automatically sends out reports and reminders to advertisers when their campaign is about to run out. That is something that I personally have a hard time remembering to do. It’s always nice when you get an email one day saying “Thanks for the reply, I’ll go ahead and renew for another month.”, especially when you did nothing to monitor that advertiser’s campaign yourself.