Geeky Habitat

PART 2 UPDATE
The release of Part 2 of this tutorial has been delayed until the release of OpenX 2.5 Stable. Please see my post here for full details.

If you have a blog or a website and are finding that you seem to have less control over your advertisements and how they are running and performing then this tutorial might just be for you. OpenX is an advertising management tool that can allow you to manage your advertising on several of your websites with the greatest of ease. Best of all. IT IS FREE!!! To see the full feature list of OpenX take a look at the OpenX Feature List Here. Otherwise continue reading and have a look at the Introduction and Background section below for a good summary of what OpenX can do.

Tutorial Details:

Difficulty: Medium (click image for more details)

Tutorial Parts:

This is Part one of a two, possibly three part tutorial. Part two which will cover the use of OpenX will be released on … (PLEASE SEE TOP OF THIS POST FOR ANY UPDATES)

Requirements:

• Operating System: Independant (will not make a difference).
• Web Hosting account with a single MySQL database free.
• The ability to set permissions on files and folders on your hosting account
• The ability to FTP files to your account
• Desirable - SSH Access if available will make things a lot easier but is not required.
• Desirable - The ability to schedule Cron Jobs is desirable.
• (I recommend and currently host with PC-Core.net if you need to look for somewhere to host)

Starting Point:

The tutorial assumes that you have already created a MySQL database and assigned a user with full privileges to the database.

Introduction and Background:

As mentioned above, OpenX is an opensource tool for managing advertising campaigns across one or more websites. OpenX grew out of a program originally called OpenAds, and has since had many improvements to increase the usability and performance of the back end engine. OpenX runs in PHP and uses a MySQL database as the back end for storing all the content such as advertisements.

OpenX is quite scalable, whether you use it across a couple of sites like me, just to be able to keep a track of what advertisements you have where as well as the ability to track the statistics of which ads perform better on different areas of a particular site, or if you wish to deploy OpenX as a means to track advertising areas that you wish to sell on your own website. This tutorial will provide the basis of an understanding as to how OpenX works and how you can get it working to make your life easier and your ads more profitable.

OpenX Contains two significant sections that I should point out and define before we continue. These are Advertisers and Publishers. An advertiser can be thought of as the provider of the advertisement content. If you are using affiliate programs such as that provided by Commision Junction the advertisements that you get from there would exist under an specific Advertiser in OpenX. An advertiser has one or more “Advertising Campaigns” that contain the individual advertisements that will be run for the advertiser.

A Publisher is who is displaying the advertisements. For those people who are just running this for personal advertisement management across a couple of websites you could create a Publisher for each separate website that you are running, for example I currently have two active publishers. One known as GeekyHabitat.com and the other is SecludedHabitat.com. The reason for this will become apparent in a moment. Each publisher has one or more “Zones” the Zones are the individual areas of a site where an advertisement can be displayed. For example consider the below picture (click to enlarge), the area highlighted in green with a red arrow is just one of the Zones that I have set up for GeekyHabitat.com.

Zones are what are used to physically place the advertisements on a page. Once a zone has been created for a publisher. You can then assign advertising campaigns or individual ads to that zone and OpenX will rotate the advertisements for you.

Now on to the fun stuff. Throughout the tutorial I will provide more information and definitions as they are required.

Installing OpenX

Now that you have a brief overview of OpenX it is time to install and configure the software. Cruise over to http://www.openx.org/download to get the software. Unzip the software and upload to a new directory on your webserver. In this example we will use the directory openx (i.e. http://demo.geekyabitat.com/openx).

Make sure that you have handy the database name and database login details that you will be using for this installation.

Step 1 - Welcome Page:

Click “Continue”.

Step 2 - Accept Terms and Conditions:

If you accept the terms and conditions click “I accept”.

Step 3 - Privacy Policy & Updates

1) Make sure that Check for Updates is ticked.
2) If you accept the Privacy Policy click “I accept”.

Step 4 - System Check:

In this step ensure that there are no errors. You will see in the below image that we have some issues. If you have SSH Access to your server change directory to the openx installation directory and run “chmod -R 777 var” to set the correct permissions for example (and on the www/images directory) otherwise you will need to do this in your FTP client. You should then see the second image.

Step 5 - Database Settings:

1) Enter the database Hostname (for most installations this will just be “localhost”).
2) Database Port Number (once again this will most likely be the default).
3 + 4 + 5) Enter the database name, username and password.
6) if you wish to change the table prefix for any reason you can do so here (default is fine).
7) Click “Continue”

Step 6 - Database Installation:

You will see a confirmation message that the database has been successfully created. Click “Continue”.

Step 7 - Configuration Setup:

On this screen accept the defaults, these will be covered in a later tutorial. Click “Continue”.

Step 8 - Administrator Account Setup:

Fill in the details you would like for the administrator account and then click “Continue”.

Step 9 - Install Demo Data:

I *highly* recommend installing the demo data even if you think you are not going to use it. Accept the default and click “Continue”.

Step 10 - Installation Complete:

The installation is now complete. Click “Continue” to be logged into the interface.

Configuring OpenX

Now that OpenX is installed it is best if we configure a few options, then secure the configuration file so that the critical settings of OpenX cannot be modified.

Step 1 - Log In:

Go to the administrator interface http://www.yoursite.com/openx/www/admin/index.php and log in with the account details you created during setup.

Step 2 - Settings Tab:

Click Settings to get to the Main Settings Page.

Step 3 - Administrator Settings:

1) If you have access to set up a CRON Job untick this box. Otherwise leave this ticked.
2) Ensure your correct timezone is selected.
3) Click “Save Changes”.

Step 4 - Banner Settings:

1) Tick the checkbox “Allow Webserver Local Banners”.
2) Click “Save Changes”.

Step 5 - Database Settings:

1) If you need to you can (under certain circumstances) increase performance by using Persistent Database Connections. For most people leave this as the default.
2) Click “Save Changes”.

Step 6 - Debug Logging:

1) Uncheck Enable Debug Logging. I only recommend this setting if you are having problems with OpenX.
2) Click “Save Changes”.

Step 7 - Delivery Settings:

If you use a different URL for SSL connections you can use page to change the default URLs for your advertisement deliveries. Accept all other defaults on this page by clicking “Save Changes”.

Step 8 - General Settings:

1) If you use an SSL certificate and would like to force people to connect with SSL to the user interface select the checkbox here and enter the port number (usually 443 by default for HTTPS connections).
2) Otherwise accept defaults by clicking “Save Changes”.

Step 9 - GeoTargeting Settings:

1) OpenX has the ability to restrict the geographical location that an advertisement is displayed to based on the IP address of the originating request. I recommend that you turn this on and can do so by selecting “MaxMind GeoIP” from the dropdown. Leave the rest as defaults to use the free database (updated every 30 days) otherwise if you have an account to use the paid database you can enter it here.
2) Click “Save Changes”.

Step 10 - Interface Defaults:

1 + 2 + 3) To make your life more pleasant using the application (and easier) tick the checkboxes displayed here to show you graphical representations of banners rather than just the HTML code in the admin interface.
4) Accept all other defaults on this page and click “Save Changes”.

Step 11 - Invocation Settings:

1) Select all allowed invocation types, unless you have a specific reason not to allow them.
2) Click “Save Changes”.

Step 12 - Statistics and Maintenance Settings:

Accept all defaults on this page, click “Save Changes”.

Step 13 - User Interface Settings:

Accept all defaults on this page, click “Save Changes”.

Step 14 - Change Permissions of Config File:

Under the openx/var/ directory you will see a file called xxx.conf.php (where xxx is equal to your domain name). CHMOD the file to 444 either via ssh or via your FTP program. This Completes the configuration and securing of your OpenX Installation.

Part 2

Due to the length of the tutorial I have had to cut it into several parts. In Part 2, I will cover the following:

• Create a new Advertiser
• Create a new Advertising Campaign
• Create a new Publisher
• Create a web site Zone
• Publishing your advertisements

Keep an eye out for this in the very near future.
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