Comparing Ad Servers – Any Suggestions?
For a while now I have been running Adphilia and we are only a small site representation company that is slowly growing. We have spent a lot of time trying to source the right Advertising server to meet our needs, but we still haven’t been able to find the right one in my mind. We have toyed with using free ad servers like OpenX or Google, as well as corporate ad servers like Right Media or Doubleclick. This is a post which just outlines what we have found within the company.
Free Ad Servers:
Open X – OpenX is an amazing piece of software that allows medium and large website to control their inventory. It is cost effective because the software is free, however you need to think about the implications advertising will have on your hosting servers, because huge amounts of ad serving can mean very large bandwidth costs. I also find OpenX a little hard to understand when you are first using the serving, plus I’m sure the larger your sites are the more complicated it becomes.
Google Ad Manager – Google Ad manager is a great product but it is built specifically for small publishers. It has a great design and easy to use. The first issue is that you can only use this ad server for small sites, because it is not compatible with any larger ad servers, and you have to put ad code straight into the header of your site. Additionally, I really don’t like the fact that when you deliver your first campaign you have to set it all up the day before it is allowed to be start. Small but bloody annoying.
Corporate Ad Servers:
Zedo – Zedo is very professional company with some great customer service. However, with them we got caught on the first hurdle, cause they were very expensive compared to all the other companies. Possibly, this is due to the great customer service and the results they can bring your sites. However, if you don’t have a great sales team to match what they can offer, there isnt too much point.
DoubleClick – This company just amazes me. Doubleclick seems to be a mish mash of several individual sections of software that has been mashed into one tool. Instead of Trafficking, reporting, billing and account details all in one sections, they seem to have segmented them, thus making it very untidy. However, they are the worlds best ad serving tool and the most used.
Atlas – Atlas, I tried to contact 5 times and they have never even responded to the messages I left. So I didn’t even get past the pricing stage let alone using their service. Typical Microsoft!
After all of these experiments it didn’t really bring me to finding the ad server solution that I was after. Im wanting a piece of software that is easy to understand and us, which doesn’t cost the earth, preferably free and web based. Does anyone know of a solution that I should try?
47 Comments
it is totally new to me that Zedo is expensive…an in terms of contacting Microsoft: I suppose leaving a voicemail at reception in a large company without giving much information of what you are looking for will very unlikely get you a response…
it is totally new to me that Zedo is expensive…an in terms of contacting Microsoft: I suppose leaving a voicemail at reception in a large company that offers a huge product suite for both publishers and advertisers without giving much information of what you are looking for will very unlikely get you a response…try contacting the right department via email
Zedo, has since sent me an email direct and there was a big miscommunication between their company and ours. Since that time I now understand that they are quite afforable. They might even now be the company for my network!
Hi Steven, thanks for taking the time to give your feedback on OpenX and a useful roundup of options and your experiences – quite useful for people!
Some will love the complete control and ability-to-customize which a self-hosted solution provides. Some will not. And for this we have our Hosted version of OpenX
http://www.openx.org/hosted
Cheers,
Arlen Coupland – OpenX
Hey Arlen,
Just wanted to let you know that OpenX is not safe at all. My site got blocked by google 2 times this month.
For those who do not belive me just check the google register.
Cheers
Hey Steven,
Let me know if you already went with a solution because I’m going through this process now. I’m looking to possibly move away from GAM to DFP, Atlas or another solution. I’m near the end of my comparison and would love to know where you netted out.
Thanks
Hello,
Since you’re looking for suggestions for an ad server. AdSpeed is an independent ad server and ad manager. You enter your ads and their targeting criteria into our system. We serve ads, track impressions, clicks, revenue, conversions and report ad statistics in real-time. You can easily manage everything about your ad inventory through our user-friendly interface. AdSpeed combines the latest ad serving technologies with advanced web analytics to maximize your advertising revenue.
You can try the demo for yourself here:
http://www.adspeed.com/
Son Nguyen
AdSpeed
Hello Steven –
Which ad server did you eventually choose to use? I’m looking for an ad server that is fairly open i.e. to allow customization/extensions that I want to build in… – would appreciate any suggestions..
Arun
Hi Pete – same question as the one I posted to Steven since you were in the process as well…
regards,
arun
Hi All,
E-consultancy has published this document “Ad Serving Solutions – A Buyer’s Guide” – January 2006.
Also, I work for a young innovative high-tech company in the adserving sector. Maybe, you can be interested in our solution [ad.agio]. Two leading publishers in the Italian market have been using [ad.agio] for several years. They have switched from DART by Doubleclick and Helios by Adtech to [ad.agio]. I will be happy to email you some more information (info@neodatagroup.com).
Ciao
Sara
i can tell you google ad manager is very buggy. i am not confident with it and the support sucks. total disappointment so i now go back to using my current openads. this is the first disappointing google product i have workded with.
One adserver that wasn’t mentioned in this thread is OpenAdStream. I would rate it along the caliber of DFP in terms of top tier Hosted solutions.
http://www.247realmedia.com/EN-US/us/open-ad-stream.html
DP,
I took your advice, and took a look at the Open Ad Stream site.
Wow. It didn’t tell me anything I needed to know – no features, no screenshot, no price, nothing.
“So much for that!”, I thought.
If they’re not going to put the information I would need to recommend this to a client in a an easy to find place, displayed in an easy to read manner…
… there’s not a chance I’ll even consider investigating any further.
hey frndz ,
i know a company that provides almost end to end solutions for digital adsales. it is Uniken Systems.
they have a product AdApt which takes care of contract management,campaign management, revenue recognition, invoice processing and management. As far as I know the product can integrate with both OpenX and Real Media and it is very cheap as well.
I used OpenX for several years and with great pleasure… But since several months we – and many other publishers – are experiencing some severe problems. The OpenX crews is aware of these problems but they leave them mostly unanswered in their own support forum.
Our problem is we are about to start an adnetwork, we would love to continue working with OpenX but is feels like implementing a time-bomb in our businessmodel since the bugs remain and remain.
Right now i’m doing research on what solution to use, Google solution is to small for us, right now i’m looking at Adbutler.
Wonder if anyone could recommend a server-solution
Hi,
What would you recommend for quite smaller ad agency, serving about 2-3m impressions a month? I’m really struggling to source some solutions. Thanks for help.
Try Adjuggler
Hi folks,
If you’re looking for an alternative, take a look at our ad server BittAds: http://www.bittads.com
It’s completely free up to 25 million views/month, no strings attached, and you can set up an account in a few minutes.
cheers,
Jaap de Heer
Streamtech / BittAds
hi all,
@steven : have you finalised your analysis and made the decision yet ? My company is specialised in the analysis, implementation and operations for digital advertising.
There is clearly a distinction to be made between (nearly) free solutions and corporate solutions, but that is mainly influenced by the publisher’s requirements and/or businessmodel.
If any of you would like some more information in detail, just send me a mail and I’ll be happy to help you further,
kind regards,
Alex
I can’t really understand why you don’t take openads/openx.org. If you face problem with the hosted service just go ahead and host it on your own. what else could you wish for as a free and professional service?
Above all forget about the jerks advertising here their own admanager system – its just pathetic guys. openx is free, has a huge userbase and will continue to the future – what else you want?
Like jakub I am really struggling to decide which ad management system to go for. My programmer installed openx on our server and Iv’e had nothing but problems with it. Our other sites on the same server have become so much slower and the admin panel is super slow. My programmer wasn’t that impressed with the coding.
It’s so hard to find some honest, unbiased reviews! As Cuson mentioned, a perfect example are the people advertising their own admanager systems in these comments.
Since you Steven have compared several different systems, I too would like to know what you have chosen and how its going.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
@the person who said the ad service people were pathetic…I disagree. I came to this post in my search for an ad service and I am considering all the options. Personally I appreciate them advertising themselves because I have the opportunity to check them out and one of the links I follow from here might just be the answer to my prayers. This is all about advertising after all!
Hi guys,
If you are going to advertise an ad server, I think it’s important to explain why it is different or better than OpenX or GAM.
OpenX has received a lot of bad press because of its security holes but I assume these have been fixed in the latest versions.
That said, if anyone needs a self-service ad system, kinda like Facebook Ads, so that your advertisers can login, create their ads, pay online and track their ads easily, then I’ll like you to give Trafficspaces a look.
Here are some screenshots. http://www.trafficspaces.com/tour/
I’ve had some experience with OpenX and for the most part we fell in love with the control and detail built into the system. For open source software it was on the top of my list. We did run into some issues running the maintenance script for logs and eventually we discovered that the system was inaccurate at serving out ads for a specified number of impressions—advertisers were pissed to say the least. We also had some problems with our MySQL server going down during high traffic or high serving times. I’m confident that OpenX knows of these issues and will beat these bugs at some point but I’m just a little shy at this point. This is pretty complicated stuff—I commend their efforts thus far. I too am looking for an ad server solution to commit to using for the long haul but haven’t found the perfect fit yet.
banman pro is your solution
We, too, have been using downloadable OpenX for 3 full years. Worked great, but the last 6 months has been plagued with delivery issues. Openx is very slow to respond to support requests. Small shop, 5 employees total. We delivery in the area of 10-12mil impressions a month. Anybody with some new insight or suggestions?
I use openX-hosted to manage 30+ million impressions a month across 5 or 6 sites. It’s easy, you can create subusers to view reports, or even manage campaigns and website zones, etc. I work with advertisers who have zedo, or collective media (did you try them?), and others. Also with advertisers who can’t fulfill specific requests like time of day, or browser-specific restrictions/filters.
OpenX might seem a bit overly featured/complex at first…..but it’s not. The only issues I have with OpenX are the lack of real time reporting (or even hourly), as well as the occasional bad ad that creeps through openX Market (like adsdaq, where you set a minimum pricing for openX to beat, and if it can’t, it shows your ads).
It’s great. I manage remenant, contract, exclusive, and even irregular formats like site skins and custom text. No issues with multiple sites, dozens of advertisers, and hundreds of banners.
You’ll come to hate it soon enough. I’ve used it for 6 years now, and it’s just gotten worse and worse. My site has been hacked twice in the last 4 months now due to OpenX issues. And there’s no support at all.
So now I’m here checking out other solutions. OpenX is past its prime.
I can recommend EmdiateAd. These guys a really professionals and their system is good and easy to use.
Website: http://www.emediate.biz
“Emediate provides publishers with a user-friendly and flexible ad serving solution that makes it easy to manage advertising campaigns whether this is for online, mobile or video.
We offer three different solutions depending on your number of websites, your need for support, tailor-made setup etc. “
why google have paid ad server (double click) when they offer ad manager
Adjuggler has everything you could need. Great customer service, free training and trafficking if need be.
I see people still comment here so I thought to comment about Zedo. Zedo is awful and I don’t understand how people use them.
The backend is terrible, reporting very limited. Just view the html source of it and count how many times the tag is there (the open tag, not counting the closing tag). I’ll save you the time, it’s between 3 to 5 times. This clearly shows bad programming and ignoring simple web standards (and who knows what goes in the code we can’t see).
And to top it all, it’s also unsecure but I won’t say more about that
It didn’t show the html tag i wanted. In the source, look for the tag: HTML (the one that should be only once per document).
OpenX 2.8 has a serious and known security exploit that ruined our site with malware and as the result, it was blocked by Google. We then made the switch to AdSpeed to get better customer support and it’s very similar and also quite easy to use.
Great post! I also saw some ad servers listed at http://www.sonicworth.com
Here is my review for openx and google dfp
I have a small site and i was using openx free solution successfully until 1 day i login to my site and get a notice that “my site a suspected attack site” all in red and warning signs everywhere. With a little more research i discovered that google blocked my site as potential malware attack site because i have openx code on my site. Openx is not only an ad server, but also an ad network so they can serve their own ads through their code if you allow them to. So since the openx name is already tied with something shady, google determined that my site is also something shady and blocked it. I fixed it all once i removed the openx code and placed the actual advertiser code direct on my site. It was super time consuming and frustrating!
Then i moved to dfp, only to realize that you MUST have google adsense account in order to use it. well my google adsense is banned which means – i can’t use dfp, even if i am putting other advertisers on my site.
So far i havn’t found any other free solutions for ad serving on sites with less than 60K impressions per month.
i`m using Openx on my adserver http://ads.vortecs.ro and i`m charmed with the results
I have heard good reports from some very active CPA publishers, about Ad Shuffle and Zedo…
I’m also currently investigating ad servers, my criteria is a simple and easy platform, with good tracking matrix, down to the keyword level.
Hi everyone-
I work for an ad agency that is rapidly shifting budget into the interactive department (where I work). We are starting to build out our display partnerships and need an efficient ad server to manage our ads and distribute ad tags to the networks. We won’t manage delivery or anything, we just want to host the creatives and then track the metrics so we can keep tabs on our vendors.
Any Suggestions? Thanks!
Hi Steven,
Here’s my 2 cents. DFP is truly the big dog of the industry. I’ve been in Ad Ops for over 10 years now…and worked on enterprise solutions (great if you want to pay a dedicated engineer to maintain it), homebuilt solutions (great if you have someone to build it and update it), OAS (24/7 Media), DFP, DFP – Small Business, plus I’ve worked with most of the other ones with regards to pulling reports etc. DFP is the most complete package with the best support. It has amazing reporting capabilities…far exceeding OAS which gives you a set number of canned reports. With DFP, you have oodles of options to choose from to report on what YOU want not what they think you want.
Zedo is not something that I’d recommend. I never worked with it as an ad server on my site, but anytime I got Zedo tags…I saw a 40-50% discrepency between their numbers and my DFP numbers. I’ve talked to others who’ve experienced the same thing…and that just is not acceptable. 5-10%? Sure. But 40-50% is obscene.
The free servers are great if they fit your needs…again, I’ve worked on a few (was shopping for one for a site I worked on…we ended up with DFP)…BanManPro (barf), OpenX (ok but as everyone says…buggy) and looked at some others. They just didn’t stack up. Google built a great little ad server…then bought a big one to take care of the top-end business. You can’t compete with that!
DFP isn’t cheap, but you get what you pay for. Since the original article is from 2008, you might want to revisit GAM since it’s been rebranded. From what I’m understanding, if you implement DFP-SB (GAM), if you upgrade to DFP nothing really changes. Nice feature really…as a business grows you can scale.
Hope this helps…
Thanks for leaving a strong feedback for OpenX. Just to compare, OpenX should not be confused with OpenX market and OpenX download version. OpenX market place is just for publishers and advertisers. OpenX as a downloaded open source software has a strong scalability. It has been highly reliable in terms of adding new features. One recent addition to OpenX is mobile ads plugin which has been a great feature for OpenX download users and got highest reviews.
http://www.openxservices.com/openx-mobile-ads.php
thanks for those infos.
i am using a free web-based ad server. quiet new. adk2.com
but after trying openx and double click, i discover that my traffic doesn’t interest those big machines at all. i am a mid-size publisher with 4 websites. I rather use a human size partner for my ad management.
adk2 does the work as openx does but in a simplier way and it’s free.