Go Get Google Ad Manager

Google just released Ad Manager, their custom ad serving tool. This slick program allows you to serve different ads on your site through one interface.

So for example if you have sold targeted ads for 1/3 of your pages you can display your own ads, and the rest can be adsense/doubleclick backfill. This gives you the most targeted ads, and highest monetization opportunity.

Some benefits of using Google to serve your ads

• Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in French or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can – Ad Manager also supports international currencies .
• Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue – upload your own advertising graphics.
• Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
• Creative preview on live site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start a live advertising campaign.
• Day and Time Targeting: Don’t want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. Set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, in 15 minute increments. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, , operating system, language, domain and custom targeting.

Ad Manager requires an adsense login so apply for an AdSense account if you do not have one.

Unfortunately the adsense referral program appears to be discontinued so you cannot receive commissions for sending new signups. The new Google Affiliate Network site is here and currently is not integrated with your existing adsense login account.

This is a threat to OpenX, an onpen source software solution known previously as OpenAds and phpAdsNew, for managing the advertising campaigns on websites. I first used phpadsnew in 2000 just after they forked the code from phpads. My only criticism of Openx is the cumbersome interface which is not intuitive and is very difficult for clients to learn.

Read about the Ad Manager feeatures on the Adsense blog and at TC.