An earlier blog post from the Google AdSense team announces that Google’s free ad serving platform, Ad Manager, is now freely available to all AdSense publishers.
While this is good news for all small and mid-sized publishers who cannot afford the ad serving fees of DoubleClick DFP or another professional ad serving solution, the AdSense team does not address two very important aspects in their announcement: all publishers can now have their Google ads open in a new window and can have Google ads displaying in more than 3 ad units.
– opening ads in a new window
This feature is one of the most requested one by publishers of all sizes, but it was always denied to the small and mid-sized publishers, the very audience of Ad Manager, for ads opening in a new window may not be a good user experience. However, on a case-by-case basis, the feature was seen available on large AdSense partners.
Google Ad Manager does have this feature available though – and it now becomes available to all AdSense publishers, making the AdSense rules obsolete in this regard. Why was it then so fiercely prohibited in the first place? Has it suddenly become a good user experience?
– displaying more than 3 Google ad units per page
Again, this was a rule enforced in the Google AdSense program: no more than 3 ad units per page, please. If a publisher still displayed more than 3, the system would automatically not show ads after the 3rd unit.
However, Google Ad Manager works differently and there is no impediment for a publisher to display way more than 3 ad slots – and have them all filled by AdSense. Google ads will be showing in all slots and it’s solely down to the publisher’s honesty not to allow that to happen. I clearly remember a discussion in the Google Ad Manager group, when somebody asked how would the ‘3 ad units per page’ rule be enforced and the official Google answer was that it will not be enforced but publishers using Ad Manager are kindly asked not to take advantage of the opportunity.
I’ve asked these questions on the Inside AdSense blog – no reply so far.
As far as finding out details on how Ad Manager works, I absolutely recommend checking out http://www.johnon.com/605/working-4-google.html – brilliant explanation!
