Publishing Advertisements within Drupal

There are two basic types of advertisements that are quite simple to implement within the Drupal CMS. I discussed in my previous blog, I mentioned starting out your ad publishing business by getting accounts at OpenX and InfoLinks. After you do that, you can then download, install and enable the modules to power them to your site.

Adding InfoLinks

InfoLinks is not the traditional ad, but is a system that highlights words it sees in your text that an advertiser has purchased to link to their site. You can see them on this blog by rolling over any link that is double-underlined.

Fortunately, InfoLinks themselves has a great tutorial explaining how to add their module to the Drupal system. You can read it here. It will baby-step you through the process.

OpenX for Drupal

OpenX, as discussed in a previous blog, is an ad server. Meaning you enter all your ads into it and assign them all to different "zones", then add those zones to your web site, and the ad server will look at the pool of available ads and show one of them that it best sees fit based on your criteria, if more than one qualifies, it will show one of them at random.

Again, we are fortunate that OpenX themselves has a great little tutorial for adding OpenX to your Drupal CMS. Read it here.

How to Start Ad Publishing

I had a friend ask how to start publishing ads. He and a partner has a decent web site that has potential of a decent niche' audience, but they are no web professionals and need some guidance. With that in mind, I figured I'd write a little tutorial/guide here rather than just customize an answer to them directly.

First, you need a few things in order to get started.

• An ad server system by which to manage which ads appear where, when and to who.
• Ad providers in order to provide the supply of ads to show on your web site.
• A web site with decent traffic.
• The ability to implement the ad code, whether it be by copy and paste into your code or with a module to integrate it into an existing CMS such as Drupal or Wordpress.

Ad Server

The ad server is the system that all the available ads are added to, and the server randomly serves ads to the web site based on the criteria of each visit. Most ad servers allow the publisher to select which ads appear based on the browser being used, the location of the visitor, the time of day, langauge setting of the visitors computer and much more. Though most beginning publishers simply show random ads from the total pool available.

I recommend, and use, OpenX ad server. OpenX is free and very feature packed. It has a learning curve, but it can do most anything, and includes the OpenX Market that also supplies ads for back fill if no ads fit the defined criteria, or is willing to pay more than your other advertisers.

Get yourself an account at OpenX....once approved you are ready to start setting up your system. Setting up campaigns consists of a few different components that you will need to be familiar with the terminology of.

• Advertisers - These are the people or systems that provide your ads.
• Campaigns - A collection of banners used in the same space for the same advertiser.
• Banners - The individual banners within each campaign.
• Zones - Groups of the same sized banners from campaigns throughout your system.

An example is like this:

You partner with Google AdSense as an ad provider, you then set up AdSense as an "advertiser" in OpenX. Inside AdSense's advertiser account you set up a couple "campaigns". Let's say such campaigns will be named "AdSense Header" and "AdSense Column". After setting those up, go into your AdSense account and create two banners, one 728x90 Leaderboard and one 160x600 Skyscraper. When you get those set up, add the code for the leaderboard as a "banner" in the AdSense Header campaign, and the skyscraper as a banner in the AdSense Column campaign.

After you complete that, it's time to set up the zones. Create two zones, one named "Header" and one named "Column". In the "linked banners" tab you run through drop down select boxes of advertisers and campaigns and it will show banners available for the size of the zone. Apply them to the zone and you then have an available pool of ads for each zone.

After that is all done, you are ready to place your ads. Go to the "Invocation Code" tab in each zone and choose how you use to invoke each zone into the HTML of your web site. There are many options available.

Ad Providers

There are many providers available...there are also many different types of ad revenue models.

• CPM - Cost per mille (thousand) impressions. You get a set amount of revenue per thousand times the ad is shown.
• CPC - Cost per click, revenue is driven by how many clicks are made on the ad.
• CPA - Cost per action, revenue driven by the clicker completing a specified action, such as a purchase, a registration, or other action required by the advertiser.

There are also affiliate advertisement options, which most closely resembles a CPA type of system. You show ads for products and if anyone purchases them through your links, you get commission.

There are also other types of ad systems, such as in text ads, which highlights specified keywords in your text and turns them into paid ads, link monetization ads which take any outbound links found for subscribing merchants and monetizes them behind the scenes.

Ad Type Considerations

Different types of ads will work better for different types of sites. There are a few considerations when choosing which types to focus on. If you have a general news site, for example, not focusing on any particular topic, hobby or anything, CPM might be a good ticket for you, if you focus on a specific topic, or maybe hobby, such as woodworking for example, CPC or affiliate marketing would be a good idea, selling products directly associated with the hobby selling saws, sanding tools and the like, as a good chance of clicks exists.

Consider your site audience, think about the differing types of ad system and how each one could best benefit you to make your decisions.

OpenX Backfill Ads now Trump AdSense

That delicate balancing point has now been reached. On a few of my web properties, the OpenX Network has now trumped, or is close to trumping, Google AdSense, in terms of revenue. While this event has been a long time in the making, it is still surprising, and somewhat of a bitter pill to swallow for somebody like me who has long been an AdSense advocate and fan.

A few months back I posted an Ad Publishing Strategy with Google AdSense and OpenX in which I talked about analyzing your AdSense revenue and setting OpenX Network ads to fill in if their advertisers would be willing the pay over a given CPM value that AdSense is currently bringing in.

Well, I have been doing that for several months...then AdSense switched their reports from showing CPM and went to RPM instead, which confused a lot of people, including me. So I looked into it and found the following:


CPM is an acronym for Cost Per Mille ("thousand" in Latin.). It is the price advertisers are paying to show their ad 1,000 times.  It is the commonly accepted figure for discussing the cost of advertising campaigns.

The RPM is calculated by adding up the price charged to advertisers (CPM) for each ad block on the webpage, then subtracting the cost of delivering that advertising like sales commissions and Web hosting fees.

Regardless of that, I continued with my same process and started raising my backfill requirements for OpenX, my requirements are now about 4x the RPM for any given unit and it is filling. In the last few weeks OpenX has gotten closer and closer to surpassing AdSense in terms of revenue...and last 3 days, it has.

In studying the ad spaces further I found a couple OpenX "zones" that are getting the vast majority of the revenue...it seems I may have to up the ante on those spaces over my 4x figure and see what happens.

I am unsure of what is happening...is OpenX growing or is the AdWords advertiser base shrinking? Whatever it is, I have been getting more and more bummed out watching my AdSense revenues falling. I like AdSense, I like the contextual targeting, it makes the ads appear as much more a part of my useful content than an ad, but hey, of OpenX is now bringing in as much revenue, at the end of the day, that is the goal.