Google Ad Manager Goes Public

Thanks God it’s Ad Manager and not Adsense Manager – a minor detail yet considerable. Google today announced the launch of Google Ad Manager. The Ad Manager is free to use and works with other ad networks in addition to Adsense. Existing Adsense publishers only need to login whereas those not having an Adsense account need to apply for an Adsense account first. This Google says is a technical requirement.

What is it?

If you look at this product from a larger perspective, it’s more of a business solution and a killer application at that considering the way the online advertisement industry is going these days. So while you want to publish ads on your website, managing them is more complicated than it sounds. Especially as far as small and medium publishers are concerned, this solution gives them the opportunity to focus on more important things than managing ads.

Using it

I’ve not yet given it a trial since I tread very cautiously at the sound of the ‘Google’ word. (I once created a test account for Google Analytics only to realise that account deletion is not possible). So I’m probably just going to wait till the weekend and see for myself how other users are benifiting from it. Another concern that I have is privacy. Until sometime back it was general awareness that Google cookies didn’t have an expiration time. Later Google changed it to 30 years – I’ll have grandchildren by than – and so will my computer. But if you are worrying too much about it, think again – Google probably knows more about your business than you do – by leaps and bounds. But so far so good. Hopefully we will get to see some competition in this area as well; of course I don’t see that happening in the near future at least for the foreign publishers. If you can’t wait here’s the link to login.

A list of features is available at the Google Help Center. Backed by a brandname as strong as Google, the expectations are high and the product sure gives a lot of flexibility, manageability and fined grained control over the reports that Adsense and Analytics users are used to. Have you tried it yet or are plan to try anytime soon?