J-Donuts is a frequent poster to the Entrecard forums and always says silly things. Today was no different when he ranted “that way I can go powerdropping to my hearts content without affecting someone else’s AdSense CTR”. What he meant is that CTR is one aspect taken into consideration of Google Adsense’s Smart Pricing. Smart Pricing is when Google makes a decision to pay you less than they normally would per click. Since they are the top player in town, they make the rules, take em’ or leave em’.
Normally I don’t worry about smart pricing because my ads are targeted to my Entrecard visitors. I have quality content and receive several Adsense clicks per day. But if I did, how would I avoid having Entrecard traffic lower my Click Through Rate? Simple. I changed the setting on my adserver to show a different ad if the referrer contains Entrecard.com. Problem solved!
Well, it is if you have an adserver. Guess what, most of you do. It’s free, and just waiting for you to install it. The name of the adserver I use is called OpenX.
- For you Bluehost people, log into your control panel. Under software/services click the Fantastico Deluxe icon. Look for a program called “phpAdsNew”. This was the previous name of OpenX.
- Create a subdirectory to install the software.
- Let Fantastico set it up for you. (skip this step if you don’t have Fantastico, just download OpenX from it’s hompage and follow the install instructions)
- Upgrade phpadsnew to the latest version of Open X.
- Run through the tutorial to create an ad box. The setting to show different ads based upon referrer is found under “delivery options”
- Paste the code into your site. All done!
Don’t let my easy instructions fool you. It’s not the simplest thing in the world, but if you can follow the directions given by OpenX on their site, you can do it. Why pay a site like Showyouradhere.com 25% when you can do so much more for free?
Since I set up my ad server I’m so happy with the results. You can show different ads based upon referrer, language, browser type, even time of day. How great would it be to show Mac ads to Safari users? It shows me my clicks so I can keep track of my affiliates to be sure they are honest.
Now if you wanted to reward Entrecarders, you could show a white square to them, and Adsense to everyone else. Then your page would load much quicker too. You could even put a message like “Welcome Entrecarders” that only they would see.
Currently I show Bidvertiser Crapvertiser ads to people coming from Entrecard. If the Entrcarder clicks another page or a person comes from anywhere but Entrecard, they see one of 3 rotating Adsense ads. This allows me to do split testing on colors, size, referral vs content, and so on. This arrangement should work well because those who like my site best should have it bookmarked and come here directly.
For those who think running their own adserver is too complicated, have no fear. Google is currently beta testing it’s own Google Ad Manager. Soon you will be able to serve 3rd party ads from your Adsense account in a much simpler fashion.
The post is correct, though BlueHost will deny support for OpenX and claim that it cannot be installed on their servers!
Check out the answer from one of their senior guys — apparently he ascribes to the Peter Principle (rising to one’s own level of incompetence):
“OpenX is not something that we will install on the server. In addition the encrypted pages depend solely on the program that you are using how the program utilized the option.
Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Thanks,
Craig Realey
Support Technician Level 3
Bluehost.com
888.401.4678 “
PKI Guy: I feel there must have been some miscommunication there between you and bluehost. Bluehost will not install openX, nor will they install WordPress for you. You have to do that. All OpenX does is create a database, same as WordPress. You don’t even use the database that often. You create a new subdirectory, upload the openX zip file to that directory, unzip, then follow the OpenX instructions. I’m no expert, but I figured out installation and running ads in one evening. On my site I currently have 4 ad blocks all controlled by the OpenX software.
Hm I never know this “Smart Pricing” by Google has a major impact on the AdSense $$
If you are talking about 200-ish Entrecard traffics a day, will that make a big difference?
Google never gives straight answers. They say CTR is one of several factors. It’s not something I’ve ever worried about. What excites me more is the possibility of earning more by targeting ads better.
Hi Turnip,
Thanks for your note. Yes, I know how OpenX works — I wanted to point out that even some “senior” techs at BlueHost are clueless. I asked them because of the post in your blog to make sure it was okay with them for me to install OpenX — they first said yes, then no, then that I am not allowed to install anything, and then denied that their own script installers installed it — just a total runaround. Your blog is more informative and I just wanted to warn others not to expect much from BlueHost Support.
hee hee… and better yet, if you have admin control over your own openX server you can serve ads on someone else’s site as well as your own. Billing becomes the issue then. Hosting guys usually don’t know much about the apps, they are too busy doing admin stuff, and some of them are truly ignorant.
FYI. Step 4 above (update OpenX) on BlueHost can only be partially done by the user, and CANNOT be completed (according to their support desk) without one of their support folks moving or equivalencing files between 2 partitions they have set up. So, if you try to update OpenX on Bluehost yourself, and get a “cannot create DB error”, you will be spinning your wheels trying to fix this yourself. I’ve asked BlueHost why this info couldn’t be in one of their FAQs or somewhere. The silence from them was deafening.
Thanks for this post! I’ve used several ad servers and haven’t really been happy with them (very clunky). I’ll be checking out OpenX and also checking into Google’s beta ad server – that sounds interesting.
Always? Gosh I think I’m hurt…
It’s a good idea, pity I can’t do it through blogspot yet…
Interesting Reading..
This article is bookmarked for further reading
To install openX, after letting Bluehost install phpadsnew, you simply delete all the old files except for the one config.php file. That’s the one that contains all your database info. Unzip openX then follow the install instructions. When it asks for the database name and password, look inside the config.php file. I did not receive an bluehost help and didn’t ask for any either. The DB error results because you need the DB password. This was the whole reason I used fantastico in the first place. To let it create the initial database.
we ran openx on our mosso account for a while – but then we were invited to test the hosted version of openx – i’m very happy with what we have done with it.
We have also started using pubmatic to help us sell the international traffic as best we can.
I recently upgraded my version and had some mixed feelings about it. My ad delivery is a little slower than without it, but my host has been slow all week as well.
The feature I would really like to see it do is create ad blocks like project wonderful does.
I’m not sure what the hosted version is, but I’d be interested in learning more. I have a feeling google ad manager will make openx obsolete for most users anyway that don’t plan to resell ads.
Anything for those of us being hosted on Google’s servers? I’m a blogger blogger (lol) and I would love to have something like this!
I’m eventually going to move to WordPress… when I can afford to host, but to afford to host I need my Pay per click to increase.
google is releasing something called Google ad manager, which will do almost the same thing as open-x