Open X for easier channel management and better ROI
February 22, 2014
Open X for easier channel management and better ROI
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Ad Server for Publishers
Overall Satisfaction
I was building a website from scratch for a very large medical content company that wanted to rotate a range of ads in a range of areas on the site for the wide number of products that they were selling. The Open X Ad Server worked like a dream. I was able to keep track of all of the inventory, serve it up on the correct pages, and repurpose the ads. I was also able to track which were working best and show them more often, and pull the ads that were unperforming, tweak them, and get them back up. There was a bit of a learning curve involved when I first started, but no more so than other products I have used, and I found the customer service was very supportive if I did have specific issues.
- Ease of use
- Flexibility
- Good interface
- Good customer service
- User manual
- A quick get start manual online would help
- Faster lead conversion
- A more robust website
- More product purchases through contextualized ads
- Better click through on ads because they were contextualized
Double Click, Adbrite before it became sitescout. We chose Open X because it was easy to integrate into the back end of our site and we liked the reports it provided and the ease of use. Double Click is a Google company, and frankly, while they are good at some technology, their products can be clunky failures AND we are not so sure we want to give them so much data about the inner workings of our business and keyword universe.
Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
No - I did not have premium support when I was using this product; the regular service i got was terrific. True story: I was about 2 weeks away from my deadline when I ended up in the hospital with a severe case of flu. I was trying to work on my mobile phone to get things done. My colleagues were not answering a single email back at the office, nor the marketing company we were using to promote the site, but every request for help from open x was answered right away and I was able to meet my launch date. When I asked the marketing company why they had not answered, they said they were changing their billing practices and I would have to pay $150 per hour for support going forward if I wanted any help with the items on my wish list that I had asked for weeks before the launch. We fired them in the end. Open X gave me all the help I needed without ever asking for anything additional even though they helped with some custom work for the site to get the thing launched on time.
Yes - Yes, totally. Some of the bugs might have been me just getting used to the system in a really short period of time, but whenever I asked for help, even from my hospital bed, they were on it and able to iron out the difficulties. Browsers are a work in progress; every time there is an upgrade, something can get messed up through no fault of OpenXs but they worked hard to get everything looking and functioning the way we needed it to in very rushed circumstances.
Yes, when I was in the hospital with a bad case of flu for 3 days and had 2 weeks left to fix all of my ad server blocks on all my pages. I got done 5 days early in the end thanks to them. They helped me get everything up and running and iron out browser issues and so on very quickly; while, I am sorry to say, my colleagues and the marketing company we were using at the time did ZERO to help. They never even answered my emails. In fact, the latter actually tried to hold me to ransom for MORE money! I had given them a long list of things to do and asked over and over for an ETA on when they would be done. Silence. Then as the deadline approached, they demanded more money. Totally against the contract we had agreed to. We fired them in the end because they had behaved so unprofessionally.
I explained my desperate situation to OpenX and they were on it like a shot. They were a lifesaver. We never could have launched and made money without their help.
I explained my desperate situation to OpenX and they were on it like a shot. They were a lifesaver. We never could have launched and made money without their help.
Usability
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using | Requires technical support |
- Creating ads
- assigning ads to pages
- assigning ads to ad blocks on my pages
- creating the ad blocks was sometimes buggy but that might have been odd integration at the site, which was run on Wordpress and which I did not do