Switched To Google Ad Manager

Note From ShoeMoney: I asked or new guy (as of last november) – Tigh to write up his likes and dislikes of the new Google Ad Manager. Tigh had never used any sort of ad management software before including openads which is what we were running before. I just asked him to move all of our ads and zones over and gave him Barry Schwartz excellent tutorial as a guide.

I just recently switched our ads on Shoemoney to the new Google Ad Manager. I haven’t been using it for very long, but these are some of my thoughts on it so far:

Likes:

It was really easy to setup – From logging in, to getting the first ad to show up was a pretty simple process.

Pre-sale – Having the option of selling ads before they start their run is awesome. Now when somebody chooses not to renew, and that slot is available, we can sell it and have the creative ready to post on a future date and not have to worry about taking one down and putting another up.

Organization – Its been really difficult to keep our advertising organized, with so many advertisers coming and going for different lengths of times. Ad Manager looks like it will really help our organization, because run time is all set when we upload the creative, and is archived if we ever need to know how long an ad was up.

Trafficker access – I haven’t used this feature, but it looks like I can give access to advertisers to upload their own creatives, and view their stats. This could be a handy feature in the future.

Easy reporting features – It has some really good reporting features built in. Not sure we’ll do anything with these, but might come in handy.

Targeting – Ad Manager makes it really easy to set up some easy targeting features for ads by geographic location, browser, bandwidth or user domain. We don’t do any targeting on Shoemoney, but, for my other sites this will be a really nice option.

Dislikes:

Ads on multiple sites – I’m not sure if there is a better way of doing this, but what I ended up doing is just creating zones that were for a different site and exporting the html for those only. I kind of wish there was an option, that would separate out orders by site the ad will be displayed on. For now, what I’ve done isn’t a big deal because the 2 sites I’m putting ads on, have completely different advertisers. But if I had advertisers that were similar it would be a pain in the ass to figure out what ad was on what site. If Ad Manager does this, and I didn’t see it, somebody let me know.

Ad posting delay – It isn’t much of a delay, but it does take about 15 minutes for Ad Manager to start posting the ad on my site. This is kind of annoying, because I have to wait around to make sure its showing up.

Can’t post ad now (bug) – There is a weird bug, that when I create a new order, and have that order start today and end say a year from now. I create a line item in that order, and want to have the ad start posting today. It won’t let me save the line item unless I pick a future date. But, if I save it and go back into the line item, then I can click todays date, it will let me save. This has been a pain, because when I put up the ads, I want them up now, so I had to go back and change the date to today on each line item.

Overall, I’ve been really impressed with Ad Manager. I think the more we use it and the more accustomed to it, the better we’ll like it.