Technical Solution

OpenX Tips: How to pass banner ad attributes to landing pages?

Deepa.n | | 2 min read

One of our partners came to us with a very innovative requirement for their OpenX banner ads that we placed on our site. Our partner wanted to pass the ad name and source(zone) as variables to landing pages. They basically wanted to pass the openx banner ad attributes to landing pages so that the landing pages could be modified accordingly. We thought it was a good idea and proceeded to modify it.

The idea seemed interesting to us because it could answer some of our key questions like,

  • Which zone in our site is most visible to our leads?
  • Which ad in that particular zone brings the highest number of leads to us?

Since we were running ads with varying prices, targeted at different users, the only solution we had was to use separate landing pages for the ads in order to identify which price-ad has generated the lead.

As we move forward with more and more price variants, it would be easier for us if we could use a single landing page with a differentiating parameter for the leads coming from each ad. However,the major issue is -

How to identify the price for which the lead was generated from the emails?

As this could pose a potential problem for our Business Analyst, we decided to resolve it at the earliest.

So, here is how we solved it.

What we required was to pass along variables, which are banner-ad attributes, via banner HTML code or destination URL that appears in the <noscript> tag.

So, this is how we pass variables / magic macros along to openx via the HREF tag. We need to do two things.

1. Have the HTML proper
The html on your page should look something like following:

<a href='http://domain.com/openx/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a4342876&cb=235364574&VAR1=3505&VAR2=222222' ><img src='http://domain.com/openx/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=21&cb=235364574&n=a4342876&VAR1=3505&VAR2=222222' style='margin-right: 2;float: left;' border='0' alt='_fullTitle_ in _CITY_' align='left'></a>

2. Set the destination path proper
Our destination path for the banner itself makes sure that you do NOT have any reference to those variables. Just have the plain url as is and it should work.

 

 

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