We spent our day yesterday kicking the tires of OpenAds. While a bit of an overkill for some bloggers, this is a great piece of software for those who are committed to serving ads, tracking click-thrus, and making some money.

What is OpenAds?

It’s free ad serving software that allows you to choose banners (from animated GIFs to Flash), campaigns and terms that you define. It includes a sophisticated tracking system means that helps you to gather statistics and optimize campaigns. Note: it’s also big, so it will take a while to download and then upload to your server.

How Do You Use It?

You need to make the following decisions:

  • Where the ads fit into your design (leaderboard, square ads, skyscrapers, etc.) and determine a standard size for each.
  • Each ad area, called a zone, must be defined in OpenAds first.
  • As the publisher, you can manage ads throughout a variety of sites that you own.
  • Your advertisers will give you the creative and, minimally, you should know where (what URL) they want the clicks to land on.
  • Under the advertisers, you will create campaigns that contain the banners that they want to run on your site.
  • Under the campaigns, you will upload banners and connect them to the various zones that you defined.
  • Finally, integrate the invocation code into your WordPress theme so your ads will be served.

What’s Our First Impression?

This is an amazing piece of software – but it can be overwhelming. As with anything new, you have to take the time to learn the OpenAds lingo. You can set up simple campaigns first and enhance them with other features that can help you to manage and track them.

Once you understand the concepts, adding multiple advertisers and uploading banners is quite easy. One word of warning – you have to make sure that the creative is in the exact parameters you specified in the zone. For example, if you have defined a leaderboard to serve ads that 728×90 and someone gives you an ad that is 728×60, that ad will not display!

Another thing we noticed, was that overzealous spiders (such as Googlebot) can cause your stats to report a much higher number of clicks than expected. However, we found a fix for it here.

Admittedly, we were keeping it simple and realize that we would have to give up our day jobs to learn all there is to know about this software and its features.

While affiliate bloggers will use this primarily for banner serving, we feel learning OpenAds seems like a great investment. Go ahead and check them out.