Serving dynamic ads in OpenX

Question

I have a searcher page with a sidebar with filter options and, when you change this options, the mid content updates via AJAX, matching the filter options criteria.

In this same page, I have 6 spaces for putting OpenX Ads Zones.

In order to always serving relevant content in this Zones, according to the searcher filters, I want to replace the zones with other ones via AJAX. So, if the user select, by example, Region 4 and Category 12, I will show the R4-C12 zone.

My problem here is I got a lot of categories and a lot of regions, so the number of combinations is huge. Also, I'd need 6 times this number, for I get 6 spaces in the page. This is something like 3500 zones!

My question is, is my approach correct or is there a better way for serving relevants and dynamics ads using OpenX?

If there's no a better way, I can use the API for creating this zones and that shouldn't be a problem. But then I need to know what's the limit of zones per publisher OpenX cant hold.

Answer 1

Is should be simpler to target using channels. There's a tutorial on OpenX blog describing ad targeting using site variables. IMHO, this IS the ideal way.

Answer 2

Ok, I got it.

What I did was the following:

I start with an OpenX publisher with no zones and tables in my system's database referencing the OpenX zones classses. Then, when the user creates a banner the system use the API for creating an OpenX zone, banner and campaign, linking the banner to the zone and retrieving the tags.

Also, the zones in my system have fields who can match the user's search's criteria. So, when I update the searcher's page content, I also update the ads zone with the code in the tags field of the zones who match the criteria. It can be pretty complex, but is easier to get if you think about it like if the user was searching for content AND ads, so you just need create OpenX zones references in your system who behaves like content.