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Google Ad Manager was an invite on only service but has been opened up to everyone now. Google Ad Manager is an ad serving tool that runs on Google’s own servers and requires no installation on your own server. It works with your Google AdSense account. Ad Manager helps you to increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns.
According to the Google AdSense Blog
Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.
Several new features have also been introduced with the announcement of general availability of Google Ad Manager
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Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in Turkish or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can! Ad Manager supports international currencies, too.
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Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue.
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Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
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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 the campaign.
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Day and Time Targeting: Don’t want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. With day and time targeting, you can set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, or as little as 15 minutes per week. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, user language, operating system, domain and custom targeting.
Allen Stern thinks that Google Ad Manager could potentially hurt OpenX, which is a hosted ad manager software. The difference of Google Ad Manager being hosted on Google’s servers and OpenX requiring installation on your servers could very well tip many publishers in the former’s favor.
The Google Ad Manager is much more robust than I expected and could put a hurting on the OpenX hosted platform that is apparently coming soon. Back in January OpenX (formerly OpenAds) announced a $15.5 venture capital round and the upcoming launch of their hosted ad manager.
Allen Stern also gives a somewhat hidden warning of how Google is watching your moves and with Google Ad Manager, they only gather more information, as is with all Google Services.
