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OpenX

OpenX

Overview

What is OpenX?

OpenX is an ad serving platform. It is sold option as a hosted solution for can be purchased as an installed application. It allows for easy inventory management , geo-targeting of ads by country, and provides statistics for each…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Users have successfully utilized Open X Ad Server to rotate a range of ads in various areas on their websites, allowing for effective …
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Omnichannel exchange

7 out of 10
October 04, 2019
Incentivized
OpenX is being used by the supply team in our organization. We are connected to them via OpenRTB and use them among many other exchanges …
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OpenX and Me!

8 out of 10
November 06, 2015
Incentivized
We used OpenX in a educational platform, to show ads to engage the user with similar content and to do A/B testing for registration styles.
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OpenX for SMB use

8 out of 10
May 09, 2014
It is a viable ad serving solution for our internal membership based properties. Allows for customized targeting and on the fly changes …
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M Review

4 out of 10
March 03, 2014
Used by certain departments for trafficking or reporting purposes and addresses the needs especially for smaller businesses.
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Open X, Not an Open Book.

3 out of 10
February 21, 2014
Open X is being used in the form of buying the inventory through our DSP partners in a RTB dynamic CPM buy. Anyone managing campaigns …
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Popular Features

View all 13 features
  • Display advertising (5)
    7.3
    73%
  • Ad campaign creation (5)
    6.8
    68%
  • Ad deployment (5)
    6.6
    66%
  • Ad display and retargeting segmentation (5)
    6.5
    65%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is OpenX?

OpenX is an ad serving platform. It is sold option as a hosted solution for can be purchased as an installed application. It allows for easy inventory management , geo-targeting of ads by country, and provides statistics for each ad placement.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Demos

Broadstreet XPRESS Webinar (Introductory Demo) - Sept 20, 2016 - OpenX Alternative

YouTube
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Features

Ad Network Integration

Integration with main ad networks, and exchanges to make accurate media buys.

6.6
Avg 7.4

Ad Campaigns

Features related to creating and deploying ad campaigns.

7
Avg 7.8

Ad Reporting & Analytics

Features related to reporting on and analyzing advertisements.

6.6
Avg 7.8
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Product Details

What is OpenX?

OpenX Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

OpenX is an ad serving platform. It is sold option as a hosted solution for can be purchased as an installed application. It allows for easy inventory management , geo-targeting of ads by country, and provides statistics for each ad placement.

Adobe Advertising Cloud, AppNexus, and Google Marketing Platform are common alternatives for OpenX.

Reviewers rate Ad forecasting and optimization highest, with a score of 7.6.

The most common users of OpenX are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(30)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Users have successfully utilized Open X Ad Server to rotate a range of ads in various areas on their websites, allowing for effective monetization and maximizing ad revenue. This flexibility has empowered users to track inventory, serve ads on the correct pages, and repurpose ads as needed. By leveraging the performance tracking capabilities of Open X Ad Server, users have been able to identify the best-performing ads and display them more frequently, resulting in improved engagement and higher conversion rates.

One notable example of Open X Ad Server's impact is its implementation by Mail.com Media Corporation, serving millions of unique users and half a billion ads per month. This adoption not only reduced dependency and costs associated with third-party ad networks but also granted more control over network inventory. Another interesting use case involves the integration of Open X Ad Server in free-to-play Facebook and Mobile games, allowing for targeted advertising, cross-promotion of internal games, and a customer relationship management approach to engaging players.

Furthermore, Open X Ad Server has proved valuable to various organizations for programmatically reaching more users, generating customized reports for clients to demonstrate advertisement performance, managing online advertising for local newspapers to increase impressions and ROI, running ad campaigns across multiple sites, and addressing specific needs of smaller businesses. Its utilization extends even to educational platforms for enhancing ad engagement through similar content targeting and A/B testing for registration styles. Additionally, it has been employed by departments in different industries to promote products, partnerships, and memberships with its customizable targeting options.

However, some users have reported experiencing technical issues with the system and have encountered long response times from customer support. Nonetheless, despite these challenges, the quality and performance of Open X Ad Server make it a worthwhile investment for many teams seeking effective ad serving solutions.

Based on user feedback, here are the top recommendations for using the software effectively:

  1. Clearly define your goals and requirements before implementation and communicate them explicitly to tech support for better guidance.
  2. Prioritize structuring inventory and network configurations at the beginning to streamline operations and ensure a smooth transition.
  3. Allocate enough time for training to maximize software capabilities and avoid potential issues.
  4. Take advantage of the feature to create saved reports for easier and faster reporting.

Implementing these recommendations can help users optimize their experience with the software and achieve their desired outcomes more efficiently.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-15 of 15)
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Gabriela Band | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • A lot of data points to optimize sent on the bid request.
  • Good coverage on desktop and mobile app.
  • Very good reporting filters on the platform.
  • The Support team is a bit slow to respond.
  • The platform is not very reliable.
  • Prices on the exchange are a bit high compared to the competition.
October 04, 2019

Omnichannel exchange

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Their reporting API is very complete
  • A lot of video inventory
  • Good customer service
  • Not a lot of inventory outside North America.
  • Prices are a bit high across the platform.
  • We have found discrepancies on how impressions are counted on their platfrom and our systems.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Lots of volume and cheap.
  • Strong in geos that are hard to reach, specifically APAC.
  • Some premium publishers that are only on their exchange.
  • Bad customer support. Account managers change every 3-4 months.
  • A lot of fraudulent activity on the exchange. Not enough anti-fraud filters.
  • Some technical issues with clearing impressions have happened with them.
November 06, 2015

OpenX and Me!

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • A/B testing was particularly good, having the ability to configure probabilities and other settings.
  • Analytics was well detailed.
  • Integration and implementation were simple and easy to customize.
  • User interface is not so straightforward.
  • Documentation was not as complete as it could be.
May 09, 2014

OpenX for SMB use

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Micro targeting
  • Ease of trafficking ads
  • Ease of trafficking placements
  • More robust reporting features
  • Creation of users with specific permissions
  • Delay in reporting
March 03, 2014

M Review

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Tool quickly identifies how to link zones
  • Able to create placements quickly
  • Easy to use the UI
  • UI makes sense but needs a revamp
  • Have to drill down into placements, creatives, etc
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • OpenX easily allows us to manage our network and inventory.
  • Enterprise support staff is very helpful; training is accessible.
  • They are local to Los Angeles.
  • Reporting registers relatively quickly.
  • Propagation could be improved; ad units that need to go live immediately could take up to 45 minutes to propagate.
  • Over-complexity can be confusing. There are multiple tiers before assigning ad units per order and it seems unnecessary.
  • Real-time reporting or a status dashboard would be great.
February 21, 2014

Open X, Not an Open Book.

Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • When it comes to RTB and spending on the open exchange market, the number one reason why we spend in one exchange over another is simple performance
  • When Open X doesn't perform which it tends not to, we have to shut that exchange off. This exchange tends to not perform at a CPA or CPC KPI and tends to not have the safest sites either.
  • Because I only use Open X as an exchange which I tap into from a DSP I can't speak to it's other capabilities.
  • Get better publishers, have more transparency.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • OpenX is a system that was designed to scale as is evident in some key design decisions found throughout the platform. The multi-server setup that was chosen at Mail.com allowed for a distributed server architecture which separated the front end web delivery nodes from the backend MySQL Database master which replicated data back to each front end delivery node mysql slave. This eased the ability to horizontally scale as needed due to the ingenious separation of the ad impressions data tables on the delivery nodes which were being collected locally on each ad impression and then processed periodically back to to the master database which replicated the aggregated statistics back to the delivery nodes. The ability to load balance across the front end web delivery nodes, add caching at many different layers, utilize a CDN for the static ad images, implement PHP accelerators, and hit memcached instead of the MySQL master made the OpenX platform a service that was very resilient to failures.
  • The ability to optimize the platform is also something that OpenX does very well. This is evident in many of the config key parameters available. In addition to OpenX specific tunable's, optimizations can be made at many different levels in which the system sits. These include hardware and operating system level optimizations, tcp and networking stack optimizations, web server/php-cgi configurations, and database (MySQL InnoDB) tunable's. There are many different optimization knobs that can be tuned to help scale the application for the best performance possible
  • The documentation was simple, to the point, and well written which led to an easy initial implementation and roll out of a multi-server setup. The installation and upgrade procedures were straight forward even for the complexities of the multi-server setup. I also found the OpenX team to be accessible and even got a chance to meet some of the team at their Up Close and Personal events at Cal Tech in Pasadena. Core developers were on hand to answer technical questions and also made themselves available to us via email and irq channels.
  • The open nature of the OpenX platform allows for flexibility in the choice of web serving platform to use (Apache, nginx, Lighttpd) and also the database management systems (MySQL, PostGreSQL)
  • Although I do believe that OpenX was designed to scale, many of the platform's target users are running single server implementations which probably led to the silly choice of MyISAM as the default database storage engine for the MySQL tables. In multi-server setups or any installation with a significant amount of load these should be altered and optimized for InnoDB. The default storage may have changed since my last roll out of this platform but I do remember the tables needing altering before putting any significant amount of load on them.
  • In a multi-server setup sometimes problems can arise from the statistics collector and processor on the front end delivery nodes that process the ad impression data and aggregate the resulting statistics back to the master database resulting in several scenarios in which the master database can be out of sync with information collected on the delivery nodes and manual intervention is needed. However, most of these problems can be monitored and engineered for.
  • The focus of OpenX on enterprise customers serving hundreds of millions of ads as opposed to the long tail of smaller publishers who simply can't afford to utilize the enterprise hosted solution and must utilize the OnRamp solution which has suffered from performance problems and might not be a viable option for many medium sized publishers
Avery Alix | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • It's inexpensive to license, or at least it was. We basically paid nothing to use OpenX up-front, so it was easy to convince the powers that be to let us invest some time into the software.
  • It's flexible, allowing creative teams to do more than simply sell ad impressions or clicks. We used it to pop-up informational and fun content to specific subsets of players.
  • OpenX was sometimes tricky to use and didn't feel like a well-polished product. That is exacerbated when you're using custom modules to make the software do things it wasn't intended to.
  • Gaining access to OpenX data and instrumentation was a chore, making reporting a manual process that was time consuming.
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