Yesterday Google announced a new product named Ad Manager. In short, it is a hosted ad management solution, like OpenAds (aka PHPAdsNew) but OpenAds is not hosted. So the benefits of the Google Ad Manager product is that you don't have to use your server resources to serve up ads, you can use Google's. You can see a tour of the product, if you are interested.
I actually started experimenting with it yesterday on our forums. The top four ad ads, (first two rows) are served via Open Ads, while the bottom row (last two ads) are served by Google Ad Manager. I selected one ad to show my Google AdSense ads and one ad to show some test banners. Here are the ads that are generated for me now (keep in mind, I keep testing them, so they may change):
Let's zoom in on the Google AdSense ad:
Notice the little icon at the bottom left of the AdSense ad? It is not clickable or anything, but I think it symbolizes that the ad is served by Google Ad Manager. Why? Because no other Google AdSense ads have that icon.
I will be testing this out in detail and then I hope to provide an easy step by step walk through on how to set up ads that rotate in our blog ad format (which is the typical ad format for most new blogs these days). So if you are wanting to play with it, hold off a bit until I get the kinks worked out and so I can simply guide you through the process (or you can do it yourself).
Of course the discussion about trusting Google, Google owning the world, the Internet and now DoubleClick...
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld,DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
