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phpAdsNew has now changed it's name to OpenAds.
This phpAdsNew review has been expanded to also be a OpenAds review
I needed a system that I could track for my affiliate programs, banner impressions and banner click throughs, to see which products and which banners my visitors are interested in, to check whether affiliates were scaming me and so I could provide more products and information on what interests my readers.
phpAdsNew (OpenAds)also lets me use text so that I can test effectiveness of different text inputs. Here is a posting from another forum that lets me explain the functionality in detail....
FORUM POSTER - I have a travel related joomla site, and we get visitors from all over
world. I know that because my web stats tell me. Now I am a simple soul
and unable to understand the complexities of tracing the IP. But I
think must be possible to show that same information live to each
visitor.
You may say that its not very interesting to show a
visitor where they are in the world - they already know! But I could
have a module that says "We welcome guests from xxxxxxx" which is what
I'd like to do to add some personality to the site.
Conan's Reply - You can go one step further.
You can display advertising
specific to each country - think about it how much would that affect
your sales? That would be much better than a "Hello to United Kingdom"
text.
You can show specials or ads for locations that the visitors
country usually holidays at. ie show ads of Spain to the English, ads of Bali
for Australians, ads of sheep to the New Zealanders, and ads of Sunny
Australia to the Norse in their frozen homes.
How much do you think that functionality would be worth to your site? How much would you pay for that additional functionality?
Nothing!
phpAdsNew (openAds) http://www.openads.org is open source, its GNU GPL, it's free.
phpAdsNew (OpenAds) is free and it works. It has a very well written manual for the user and another for the administrator. The manual is written in non technical terms and is very easy to understand. I believe that this manual is phpAdsNew's / openAds strongest point. It makes the software very usable and very friendly.
Also being open source php it is easy to modify for your needs.
From the box phpAdsNew / Open Ads is highly functional . It
can display ads on certain days, to visitors
from which country (with a free plugin) and just about anything you want.
There are options for advertisers to be able to monitor and change their inventory. You can run ads in different zones, different campaigns, different weighting to different banners, making them appear more frequently.
You can display and ad once per day, once per hour or once per 67.3 minutes, up to you. You can display until it reaches a certain number of views, or until it reaches a certain number of clicks.
Everything you can think of it seems to have, plus it is easy to use after a quiet couple of hours with the manual. It is even easy just to set up a quick campaign and get things running while you learn the rest, but the rest, the difficult stuff is just a check box away.
The only difficulty is deciding what you want each campaign to do before loading it up.
The banners can rotate so you can do split run tests and have full tracking of stats
With the full tracking I run seperate google ad sizes and ad types in the same banner space at the bottom of the page, mixed in are a couple of offers from affiliate programs. I can check the click thru rates of each and dump the worst performing ones, then replace them with new, and so on.
Over time this will leave me with the best performing (best paying) advertising on my site.
I know which banners or text has been shown, how many times and how many people clicked on it, I also know how many sales have been made at the other end from my affiliate programs and take all this into account.
It is all very exciting really.
phpAdsNew / openAds help stop an affiliate program scam
* Addendum: With phpAdsNew / openAds I was able to track the click throughs and banner impressions from one major affiliate program - clixgalore. There was a major discrepancy. ie They said I had NO clicks, where phpAdsNew / openAds said I had over 20 clicks. My software also said I had 30% more banner impressions. I wrote to Clixgalore.com and asked them if they could explain why this may be, here is their canned idiotic response:
No we cannot as we do not support or compare our tracking to 3rd party
products which we have no control over. Our tracking has many built in
merchant protections/security measures that ensure valid clicks are recorded
and paid to the Affiliates.
My personal feeling is that the no control over is the key phrase, ie they cannot change my own webstats so they cannot explain the differences. Open source log running on my machine vs unknown company that makes more cash if stats are not reported correctly.
Affiliate program scam?
All I am saying is that Clixgalore could not give me a possible reason for the difference and for me that just is not good enough. I do not trust a 'partner' like that. You make your mind up. I did.
I can happily say that I am no longer with Clixgalore. I think they were scamming me and their action supported my theory - I would have loved for Clixgalore to give me a plausible response but with the "F off we are right" attitude I can only assume the worst.
Thanks phpAdsNew / openAds.
* You might like to know I also use phpAdsNew / openAds to run my adsense and the figures with Google do tally up. Go figure.
UPDATE: After leaving scam operater Clixgalore I continued to recieve spam emails from them for 9 months. I disabled my account. I wrote to every email address I could find - no response - spam email still coming.
Finally a blunt email to the technical admin (found with a whois lookup) detailing the steps I had already taken and that I was also CC:'d the email to the relevant spam authorities in the USA and Australia got them to stop spamming me but still no response.
Clixgalore review: Scam / spam operators - avoid at all costs. A quick check of some prominent online forums found others had similar problems.
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