Archive for May, 2011
OpenX displaying wrong statistics
Posted by cornel | Filed under OpenX
I have seen some strange results when running the website report – one zone is showing more than one million clicks but only three impressions. The issue is quite serious because you cannot compute the clickthrough rate. First I thought that is an OpenX bug especially after that I discovered some strange data in the ox_data_summary_ad_hourly table – a very large number of lines having zone_id equal with zero.
After digging in the code and thinking twice I remembered that I modified the original code for displaying the ads..so I used Charles in order to check if the invoked url’s. I discovered that the call used to log an impression was something like server/www/delivery/lg.php?bannerid=10&campaignid=9&zoneid=4. It seemed that by mistake I used “&” instead of “&” and the campaignid and zoneid parameters were lost. Because OpenX was not able to find the zoneid it inserted lines having the zone_id equal with zero.
The problem was solved – the idea is to never log an impression without setting the zone_id..or better to patch the OpenX code in order to properly check the preconditions – I would have been able to identify problem way earlier in this case.
OpenX – enabling advanced reports on CentOS
Posted by cornel | Filed under OpenX
I’m using CentOS for my cluster and I discovered that I’m not able to run the advanced reports from OpenX – I received the following error: “Using an input encoding requires PHP support for mb_convert_encoding() and mb_strlen()”.
The solution is quite simple: you need to install the Php multibyte string library. The command for doing that is “yum install php-mbstring”