I would definitely move to zone-chaining. As you are finding out, having highly targeted contract campaigns in OpenX can cause major issues for the maintenance engine; if you hit this problem, chained zones is the only way I have come across to improve the situation.

I hope this helps!

Given the size of most of our sites and advertiser needs for various combinations of targeting we’ve gone with the delivery limitation approach. Unfortunately, though, it does cause prioritization issues for the engine.

To solve the problem, we tried this (copying the same creative into three banners under each individual campaign): 1 – hyper-tarted (weight 3), 2 – semi-targeted (weight 2) and 3 – run of site (weight 3).

Unfortunately this broke the system. I think it had to do with using the same creative but still haven’t figured that out. OpenX seems to generate unique filenames off the contents of the actual files (MD5′s I guess?). So we would have to change the file to fix this which isn’t really manageable.

Any suggestions for my problem? Should I switch to zones and chain them? Is there a way to prioritize delivery limitations that I don’t know about?

Thanks in advance!

DW

It sounds to me that the most likely cause is that the banners are not actually stored in the OpenX database, but are stored on disk, and have not been moved across. I would double-check to see if is the case as a first step!

No, I mean what I wrote.

Imagine that you are offered a campaign that pays $0.01 CPM. If you ran that campaign and delivered 10 million impressions, then you would be paid $100.00, guaranteed.

However, if you were offered a CPA campaign, which pays you $20.00 per conversion, and you ran that campaign and delivered 10 million impression, there there is a chance that you might only get 2 conversions, in which case you would earn $40.00.

In this case, assuming that both campaigns were on offer, if you ran the CPA campaign, you would have made an effective loss of $60.00!

So, it’s important that if you are going to run CPA campaigns that you monitor the performance of the campaigns closely, to ensure that you are not losing out on earnings that you could be making by running other, lower risk campaigns.