Google Ad Manager. Hot on the heels of the Doubleclick acquisition announcement, we get news that Google is testing their new display advertising engine for delivering direct client ads on your website. That’s incredible news and it’s astounding that they’ve moved so fast to re-package the Doubleclick tech. If Google can do for display ads what they did for text ads with Adsense/Adwords, then it could revolutionise the World Wide Web. Really! Why?
- It integrates completely with Adsense. If you don’t have any banner ads to serve, Adsense kicks in. What’s more the Adsense ads compete with the banner ads on price. So automatically you’ve got your own massive advertising auction system on your website. Unfortunately it’s probably going to really hurt services like Pubmatic (which I use) and the other fledgling ad auction companies like YieldBuild and the Rubicon Project which are slowly coming on stream at the moment.
- Full inventory management and reporting. Just select the ad sizes you need and the system instantly generates the tag codes to insert on the site.
- You get full control over every aspect of the advertising mix. Geographical, browser, domain and even bandwidth targeting. That’s awesome in itself, and something that most free alternatives don’t offer without a whole heap of configuration hassle. If you’ve ever tried to deploy OpenAds as it’s now called, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
- Support for CPM, CPC and CPD (cost per day), rich media, varying delivery types, frequency capping et al.
- Google infrastructure back end means robust and fast delivery.
…and so on. The main effect this will have on the advertising market (apart from making ad network execs wake up in a 2 am cold sweat for a while) is to encourage a massive growth in small business display advertising. All the Adwords users, who know and trust Adwords, will look seriously at this, and more to the point trust it from day one, because it’s a Google product. Web site owners will also trust it and deploy it as a part of their advertising armoury, and suddenly there’s a whole new DIY advertising dynamic – available globally! – to challenge the likes of Valueclick and the rest. The service is free at the moment and in test mode, but it’s definitely going to get interesting. This one is going to really reverberate everywhere, you mark my words!
Manage your online ad sales and inventory for free. Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory. * Simple, intuitive user interface: Decrease training time and trafficking steps with simplified tagging and inventory management. * Google serving speed and reliability Ensure quicker ad delivery and fewer reporting discrepancies. * Significant cost savings – it’s free! Pay nothing for ad serving, feature upgrades, or system maintenance.
THIS IS FANTASTIC!!!
If 99.99999999999999% of online ads will now come from DoubleClick/Google, it’ll be *so* much easier for my Adblock filter to nail everything at once!
Yay for progress.
Oooh you cynical revolutionary, you. :-)
Hi Nigel,
Rajeev Goel here, co-founder and general manager of PubMatic. I’d like to respectively disagree with some of your comments, and thank you for continuing to use PubMatic!!
First, Google Ad Manager is not a re-packaging of DoubleClick. It’s impossible (technically and legally) for Google to have leveraged DoubleClicks’ DART platform to create Ad Manager given that the transaction closed on Tuesday. Rather, I suspect that Google Ad Manager has been ready for some time and Google held the announcement until the close of the DoubleClick announcement. The beneift is that it clearly signals that DoubleClick’s ad server will not be made available for free – rather, Google Ad Manager will likely be the “diet”, free ad server.
More importantly, 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
Look out Nige you’re on their radar.
The spin-doctors are IN!
Do what we did and manage your own ad serving in house. We use Ad Serving Solutions http://www.adservingsolutions.com and do not have to bother with 3rd party ad servers that have all the control and reap a large portion of the revenues.