Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Turner
Sounds interesting - best of luck with it. 
Quick question - how does it compare to phpmyads? |
OpenX (previously known as phpMyAds) is a lot more complex and complicated compared with SAM. Because of its rich features (bidding, various statistics features), new webmasters may find it quite overwhelming to use.
OpenX can be very useful if you are looking to optimize the ads on your website with its statistics on Impressions, Clicks, CPC, Conversion Rate...etc. You can run ads on your website as if you are running PPC campaigns with Google.
These statistics are not that valuable for you if you are not advertising on your own website, since the number of clicks, CPC, Conversion rate...etc. are highly dependent on the design of the banners themselves (second factor would probably be the placement of the ads). Since you cannot control the design of the banners, the numbers are sort of meaningless to you.
Number of clicks, CPC, conversion rate...etc, are also meaningless to advertisers. Because these numbers, mostly, wont reflect on their own ads.
What's truly attracting advertisers is the number of visitors and page views you get per day or month.
The truth is, serious advertisers don't look at the stats that you provide on your website. People are always skeptical at first and they go through extensive research themselves to estimate the traffic to your website.
SAM on the other hand, is a much simplier system.
1. You create your ad campaigns (ad name, price, currency, description...etc.)
2. You place your ad campaign codes on your website.
3. Advertisers make purchase orders
4. You approve the purchase orders and the ads go live immediately
To help you customize your ad centre, many different areas can be edited via FCKeditor.
As the name states, its "Simple". Simplicity is, sometimes, exactly what you need.
I believe OpenX and SAM are both good products. The good thing about OpenX is that it's free and open source. Which means there are tons of programmers constantly improving it. I will, too, constantly trying improve SAM with simplicity in mind.