Three months ago, I blogged on Google’s Ad Manager, which allows websites to manage their own direct sales and remnant ad inventories (with the latter, presumably, filled primarily by Google’s AdSense). At the time, the service was limited to a small pool of clients. Google has now announced that Google Ad Manager is open to all AdSense account holders—although it does mention that you do not have to run AdSense on your sites to use its service.

Google’s product helps sites that have their own direct sales team manage inventory and creative, and it provides a convenient, popular back-fill option with AdSense. The publisher first starts by specifying ad spots (similar to YieldBuild ad zones) that can be filled with ads. It then uploads any direct-sold creative, and any impression or click caps associated with each creative. Finally, it asks the publisher to specify what it wants done with remnant inventory (ad spot impressions that can’t be sold via direct-sold ads)—AdSense and other participating networks can be used to make sure ad spots don’t go unfilled. There is some basic optimization, as well; Google can decide whether a remnant ad can outperform a direct-sold ad, and serve it instead.

Why is this useful? The chief benefit to site owners who choose to use Google’s product will be the reduction of mucking around with code. Ad tags are generated once and installed on a site template once; the rest of creative and inventory management is done through the Ad Manager console. Google also touts the savings from not having to host your own ad server; Google provides the hosting for the ad server and creatives.

What does this all mean? Google’s clearly looking to dislodge ad serving solutions like OpenX (formerly OpenAds), which provide a similar set of services through an installable program running off an ad server. Google’s solution offers the same benefit its many other products (Google Apps, Gmail, etc) have over their competitors—the cloud—although OpenX has developed a hosted version of its product, too. It will also, ideally, assemble some popular ad networks in order to optimize against something other than just AdSense (although DoubleClick, a Google ad network, is sure to figure prominently in the mix as well).

When you toss around terms like “ad networks”, “yield optimization”, and “reporting”, the new Ad Manager can sound similar to YieldBuild, which is an ad network management and format optimization service. Ad Manager, however, does not address format optimization (algorithmically determining the optimal background colors, border styles, positions, sizes, and formats for ad layouts on a page) that YieldBuild does. And, due to competitive interests, there are likely to be some ad networks that will resist working with Google, that a network-agnostic (and network-unaffiliated) service like YieldBuild, in rounding out the ad network management picture.

Rather, Ad Manager seems to be fleshing out an important part of the online advertising long tail, so well that Google will likely dominate online ad distribution.

For the smallest publishers, AdSense is the only viable option since they don’t have minimum volume requirements. In order to launch to the next level where vertical ad networks and direct sales are possible is around the 300,000 PV/month point, where the added layer of management that Ad Manager offers makes sense. Doubleclick delivers for high-volume publishers, 50+ million monthly PVs. With Ad Manager, Google is able to serve the middle ground, at least partially.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.