OpenX Information Reviews & Insights

Score1 out of 10

30 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for OpenX are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

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.

Reviews

9 Reviews

Information

All around programmatic player

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

OpenX is used by the Campaign Management team on many of our branding campaigns. We work with them programmatically via an OpenRtb integration in order to get to more users in the US. We have seen CPMs on the exchange a bit high, but the quality and performance we got from the users make it worthwhile.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

OpenX works well for campaigns where you want to impact the same user on the desktop, mobile web, and app as they have inventory from each platform. They are big in the US but they lack inventory in APAC and other big geos. I would focus on branding when running campaigns on OpenX and d use other exchanges for performance marketing.

Gabriela Band

Sales Specialist in Sales at Ogilvy (Internet, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Omnichannel exchange

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 4, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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 to increase our reach and inventory on app campaigns. We use them for worldwide campaigns although their main focus is on the US and Canada and we have not found good results in any other geos.

Pros

Their reporting API is very complete
A lot of video inventory
Good customer service

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

OpenX is a good partner, specifically for omnichannel branding campaigns as they have a big chunk of legacy desktop inventory and they have been on boarding mobile supply on the last few quarters. For performance campaigns, as their CPM prices are a bit high, sometimes it is hard to reach the desired CPAs because the competition between the DSPs is very fierce.

Verified User

Manager in Sales (Internet company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Vast network of inventory!

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

August 29, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using OpenX as an exchange that is connected to our DSP of choice. What we are seeing is that they are good in terms of volume, but not very good technically with product questions or in customer support (long response times, generally understaffed on their end). It is used by the programmatic arm of our organization and they generally complain about the fraud that is going on in the exchange.

Pros

Lots of volume and cheap.
Strong in geos that are hard to reach, specifically APAC.
Some premium publishers that are only on their exchange.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

OpenX is like a supermarket for digital inventory. You have A LOT of options, but the quality is uneven. You may get a bargain and get a good publisher for cheap, but you may also end up overpaying for some inventory that is not worth it. Their quality assurance team is not doing their job and thus it is a risk to buy inventory there.

Verified User

Director in Sales (Internet company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Great Reporting Software

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 27, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My department uses OpenX to generate reports for clients. These reports essentially detail how their advertisements performed for our eNewsletter deployments. We report on the sent, opens, clicks, CTR, open rates, etc., and OpenX is great for customizing these reports for the specific client.

Pros

Customizes reports
Gives detailed and accurate information
Is simple to use

Cons

Could provide full reporting information

Likelihood to Recommend

OpenX is great for companies who do reporting for their clients and businesses. It is easy to generate reports and make them specific to the client and the statistics that the client wants to know.

Cassidy Ebert

Client Services Manager in Sales at SourceMedia (Publishing, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

OpenX Revolutionized Local Newspaper Website

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 28, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Used OpenX to manage all online advertising for a local newspaper. This was being used to manage 100% of the online advertising for the organization.

Pros

Managing ads through ad networks like Google was very easy. It was very easy to manage the ad network ads alongside of our own ads.

Cons

No answer

Likelihood to Recommend

For large scale sites with several ad spots this is a great tool. It's especially helpful for managing impression or length of campaigns. The platform is not recommended for small sites with limited advertising.

Torin Gilkey

Web Developer in Information Technology at Lehigh Valley Health Network (Newspapers, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Open X for easier channel management and better ROI

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 22, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Ease of use
Flexibility
Good interface
Good customer service

Cons

User manual
A quick get start manual online would help

Likelihood to Recommend

What are the best ways to integrate it with salesforce.com?
What are the best ways to target our users with this tool?
To segment the users?
How can I integrate my ads with your adexchange-what sizes are you looking for in terms of banners, skyscrapers and so on. In this way I can plan my in house ad and those for the exchange to be the same size, to avoid duplication of work.

J C Mullally

Associate Content Producer in Professional Services at WebMD (Media Production, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Efficiency, ROI, and speed

Rating: 10 out of 10

February 21, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

OpenX not only made our media buying more efficient, we were able to increase both impressions and ROI to expand our branding while generating a return, which isn't easy to do.

Pros

Programmatic buying
Puts media dollars to a more efficient use
Allows for transparency in placements

Cons

Better product differentiation
Connection to more ad management tools

Likelihood to Recommend

When media buying is inefficient or manual, OpenX is particularly useful.

Joshua Franklin

Search Engine Marketing Specialist in Marketing at Provide Commerce (Internet, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

OpenX Ad Serving Platform at Mail.com

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 21, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At Mail.com Media Corporation (currently Penske Media Corporation http://www.pmc.com ) OpenX was used to power the Mail.com portal page which served millions of unique users per day and more than half a billion ads per month. The Mail.com portal page delivered unique content and was the focal point in which users would pass as they logged into their webmail each day. OpenX was chosen to supplement then reduce the reliance of third party ad networks which were already serving this strategic space in the Mail.com network. OpenX allowed Mail.com to reduce the dependency and heavy costs associated with third party ad networks. In addition to being less dependent on third party ad networks and reducing costs, OpenX helped empower the ad sales and ad operations teams by giving them more control of their own network inventory. OpenX also served ads network wide in each brand and line of business in the Mail.com portfolio.

Pros

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)

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

OpenX is well suited from anything from a small blog to a large enterprise serving millions/billions of impressions per month. Although someone with a solid understanding of the technologies and concepts involved to implement, maintain, and manage the solution is key.

Michael Grazziani

Sr. Systems Engineer in Engineering at Tango Me (Media Production, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Creative Use of Ad Serving in Video Games

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 19, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

OpenX was used to serve banner ads within free-to-play Facebook and Mobile games that had millions of daily users. This was a bit of a custom implementation, and a bit of ahead of the times for the industry in 2010. Where we acted differently was to use OpenX to serve our own internal 'house ads' in addition to external paid advertisements. We used these banner spaces, set up as separate OpenX zones, to do everything from cross-promoting our own internal games to providing information and instructions to players. Many times, players had no idea they were looking at information served up by an ad platform, but OpenX and the flexibility of modules available to us let us select and target our players with a CRM approach that was later admired by the much larger company that bought us.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Ours was a very specific use-case: Use ad-serving software to serve clickable, trackable, addressable image content into mobile and Facebook games. I can't really recommend any other software better because I know that OpenX served that purpose very well. It wasn't as robust or expensive as other ad-serving software I'd used at other jobs, but then again those wouldn't have allowed us the flexibility to perform the specific function we wanted.

Avery Alix

Sr Product Manager in Marketing at Fixer Studios (Computer Games, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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OpenX Ad Serving Platform at Mail.com

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 21, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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)

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Michael Grazziani

Sr. Systems Engineer in Engineering at Tango Me (Media Production, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience