Testing Google Ad Manager

About a week ago, my application for Google Ad Manager was approved. I immediately studied how the system works and I must say that it was something I had a hard time learning. Here are my observations so far:

Google Ad Manager is a little complicated. Took me several days before I finally got how to do the placements, ad inventories, line items orders and creatives. And to think I was already following the guides and tutorials.

The system is more robust than say the OpenAds that I’ve been using before. For one, the Ad Manager is hosted by Google while OpenAds needs to be hosted in your own server. This means more efficient ad delivery as it will not put any additional load to your server for hosting the ads. There’s geo-targeting too which is nice if you only want to serve ad for a specific region or country.

You can also configure the delivery on a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-day (CPD). I’m just not sure how they manage click-fraud.

So, what does Google get out of this? Well, the system actually fills up your remnant ad placements with AdSense. That means if the allocated impressions are used up, your AdSense ads will show up instead. Pretty nice move for Google, huh?

Now, most of the display ads you see here are delivered by Google Ad Manager. The only quirk I find is that it takes a while for a new ad to show up after putting it into the system.

React to this article:

15 Comments

Jeff Sable · 18 years ago

Yuga,

I want to let you know that Chitika *Premium* ads are now easily deployed within Google Ad Manager. Here is a link to a tech note – https://chitika.com/support/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=140

Will you test this out and offer comments?

jeff at chitika dot com

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 18 years ago

@yup, similar codes with AdSense. One for the header and one for the ad placement.

@randell, the AdSense delivery is checked by default so if you don’t uncheck it, it will eventually show up in the ad placement.

randell · 18 years ago

My bad. AdSense will only compete with Remnant or House inventory.

@Yuga, I think the showing up of AdSense for remnant (and for other delivery priorities) are optional.

@Andre, they have a way of supporting rich media and iframes but using iframes is not recommended. It is advisable to contact them before doing so because there are inconsistencies with iframes with respect to the impressions.

There are still a lot of missing features for Ad Manager right now because it is still in beta. I’m looking forward to their fixes and enhancements.

Andre · 18 years ago

how bout methods of displaying the ads, only javascript? is there iframes? javascript is known to be slow depending on the ad source.
Good to hear its looking better than OpenAds which I’ve been using for years. One good thing for this is that more people trust Google so using Google as an ad platform will let you show accurate reports to your advertisers that their ads are being delivered properly. A reason why ad agencies use places like Zedo and Atlas for adserving.