Openads ad management

Openads which you may remember it as PHPads is an opensource(free to use) ad management tool. It allows you to manage advertising on your site and provide traffic stats for your advertisers. You could use it to manage ads sold directly from your site or manage third party ad network ads. It handles both text and graphical ads.

Currently in version 2.4, Openads runs on PHP and requires MySQL which most webhosts support. You can download the script from their site and there are some installation instructions provided on their site too.

Targeting and tracking

Taking a look at the on site demo Openads looks huge, they seem to have covered every conceivable option. There are a number of options which allow you to target specific countries or target visitors based on where they come from. This is great as you can display advertising to visitors who are more likely to respond to particular ads such as showing ads for German ISP’s just to German visitors.

Another great feature of this software is that it provides statistics for both publishers and advertisers. This allows both you the ad seller and your ad buyers to see how effective their ads are.

How it works

Once you have installed the software and have it up an running you can create zones that specify where about on your site you want to display ads. You then paste javascript code into the relevant areas in your HTML. These code snippets will display your ads.

You can then set up a campaign for an advertiser, or display your own ads, which can then be displayed in one or more of the zones you have set up on your site.

Openads review

Openads is a comprehensive ad software solution and its free. There are many (probably too many) options for you to tweak to make you and your advertising happy. This is not going to be a solution for everyone as you will need to invest some time in installing the software. You will also have to dedicate some time in getting to know how it works.

This is not a solution to help you sell advertising on your site but a solution that will allow you to manage the advertising for your site.