Google ad manager: Ad serving and managing made easier
Google has just launched a new service called Google Ad Manager (as reported by Wall street journal). The google ad manager is a hosted ad server which allows users to manage and sell their own ad sales and inventory on their websites. After the acquisition of doubleclick in april 2007. Google hasn’t wasted any time in developing its own ad business.
The Google ad manager promises to be a simpler, intuitive ad management system which will serve, sell, optimize and manage your ad inventory. Google is known to make products user-friendly by improving its usability and giving it free. It’s a boon for small publishers who tend to keep a separate adserver to serve ads on their site as big networks won’t take them and other networks will charge a fee to use their ad serving technology.
Google has developed the complete Ad Manager itself and says that it will primarily cater to web publishers with small- to medium-size sales forces, while the services of recently acquired DoubleClick will be for big publishers. It is being said that eventually Doubleclick services will also be rendered free.
Google hopes to make money if the users agree to carry some ads that Google sells in ad spots on their Web sites that are not filled and Google would also take a commission on revenue from any ads it sells through the ad manager system.
There are similar services like Openx, Adbrite where users allow the site to sell their website ad space directly to companies. But what differentiates the Google Ad manager from the rest is that the users can opt to utilize AdSense ads for the times when no ad is currently sold in a given space or from other competing ad placement networks like Rightmedia, bluelithium, Tribal Fusion, Tyroo, Komli etc so that there is no unsold or wasted inventory. The Google ad manager system will automatically serve ads from networks that offer the best eCPM… There are also other services like Rubicon project, Yieldbuild, Pubmatic that offer similar services of optimizing ad serving and giving the best eCPM but they act like a aggregator of ad networks as users cant run ads on their own.
According to the google ad manager site the system has features like:
- Inventory management
- Yield optimization
- Ad targeting
- Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking
- Creatives and rich media management
- Reporting
- User interface navigation
- Account administration
You can read more about the features here.
As of Thursday, Ad Manager entered a beta testing phase and users require an invite to register for the ad manager system. Publishers may apply here to participate.
I have also registered for the service and waiting for a invitation myself to check out the system. 
[ratings]
Hi Rochit,
Rajeev Goel here, co-founder and general manager of PubMatic. You bring up some great points with respect to the benefits to Google of Google Ad Manager. It’s also interesting to think about this from the publisher’s perspective. Is Google Ad Manager good for publishers?
Google’s announcement of its free ad server is interesting but not entirely new for the market. Free ad servers have been around for some time now, including OpenAds and Expo9 from Exponential Interactive (the company behind Tribal Fusion).
From PubMatic’s perspective:
- Google Ad Manager, like all ad servers, is complementary to PubMatic. Many publishers who use PubMatic do so in conjunction with their ad server, such as DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers, Atlas, or Zedo. The ad server is typically used to manage direct-sell campaigns while PubMatic is used to optimize across the publisher’s ad network relationships.
- While Google Ad Manager integrates AdSense, the leading solution for cross ad network revenue optimization remains PubMatic. PubMatic is working with multiple publishers who are already using Google Ad Manager. These publishers manage direct-sell campaigns with their Ad Manager ad server and drive increased revenue from the rest of their inventory by letting PubMatic automate and optimize ad serving decisions for them.
- Publishers should be wary of utilizing the same vendor for both ad serving infrastructure as well as an ad network. Combining the two represents a significant conflict of interest, which can disadvantage the publisher with respect to monetization.
For more on our view of the announcement, please see our blog here: http://www.pubmatic.com/blog/?p=16
We also show an example of how utilizing the same vendor for both ad serving as well as an ad network can lead to poorer monetization for the publisher.
- Rajeev Goel
PubMatic co-founder and general manager
Rajeev Goel
14 Mar 08 at 12:16 pm
But Rajeev even pubmatic runs inconjunction with komli your own ad network…. Cant I say the same for pubmatic as you have said about the ad manager ? I think the direct selling of google ad manager is an option and depends upon the publisher to go for it or not..
rochit
14 Mar 08 at 4:18 pm
Rochit, what I feel is google is again trying to get in control of private sales of ads as we see that websites with good traffic prefer to go for private sales of ads using their own adservers and not for Google Adsense. Using google ad servers will share all the information about the advertisers with Google
Kishore
14 Mar 08 at 7:12 pm
Yes websites with good traffic will prefer their own adserver. As they need to stay in control on whats getting displayed and from whom… but google ad manager is more for the small and medium sites…. as they can optimize their income and will prefer it as they dont have a salesforce. Anyways we already know google is already has control of some good products like analytics, adwords, adsense which most of the big sites use.. what was left is here.. Google ad manager
but if privacy laws and exclusivity is considered according to law adsense or adwords cannot share data with other google products unless we approve of it… like integration of feedburner with google adsense etc…. correct me if i am wrong..
rochit
14 Mar 08 at 7:30 pm