It’s funny how many bloggers and website owners assume that Adsense would give them the best chance to make money online and get something back for their effort. There is no question that in certain situations Adsense could get you lots of money. You are going to have to be in the right niche and get a decent amount of traffic for that to work. But even if you make a killing with Adsense doesn’t mean you are getting the best deal from your ad space. That’s where OpenX comes into play. OpenX is an ad server that enables you to run your Google Adsense ads vs. affiliate and other types of ads and measure its performance against them to find out if you are getting the most out of your ads.

The fun part about OpenX is the fact that you can either host your ads yourself or join OpenX community and let others buy advertising space on your website. You can then let you ads compete and find out which ones work the best for your website. If you decided to run OpenX yourself, you can always grab affiliate banners from Commission Junction or LinkShare and pit them against Google ads.

Testing is the only way to go if you want to maximize the amount of money you can earn from your ads. It’s true that you can use top Adsense keyword tools to find those highly profitable niches. You can even work hard to get more traffic to your website. But if you do not test your ads, you are not going to find the right ones for your blog. With OpenX, you won’t have to spend a dime and can do all kinds of powerful tests (such as geo-testing).

Implementing OpenX is not actually difficult. You are going to need your own host if you plan to have more control over your OpenX install. But you can always start with the hosted option available on OpenX.org. It certainly makes managing your ad inventory and testing much easier (here is how to get started).