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An hour or so with Google Ad Manager
I’ve been after a good Ad Server for my FlightSimX blog for some time. I’d been using OpenX (or whatever their name is this week) for a while, but my old hosts asked me to stop using it as it was killing their server. I’ve explored some other options, but none seemed to offer what I was after, so I was pleased to be advised by Google that my Ad Manager account had been set up and was ready to use.
When first trying to access my account, I was asked to select my time zone. I only had a choice of US zones, so I dropped an email to Google and they kindly set my account to the correct UK zone. For some reason, you can’t do this from your account yourself. Not to worry. A quick acceptance of the T’s & C’s and I was in.
My first thoughts were “where do I start?”. Fortunately, there’s a bunch of tutorials and the usual extensive Help system provided that soon got me moving.
I did get a little confused over some of the terms, but I guess that’s only because they’re different to other packages I’ve used.
Here’s how I went about creating my first ad:
- Go the the Inventory tab and create a new Ad Slot. Think of this as the physical space on your site where an ad will appear. You specify the size of the ad, and you can also opt for Google AdSense ads to be displayed under certain conditions. More on this later.
- Go to Placements and create a new one. This one threw me until I read through the Help. A placement is really (potentially) a group of ads on your site. I say potentially, as it can be just one ad if you like, as was the case for my first ad.
- Assign an Ad Slot to your placement.
- You can specify targeting at this point if you wish, but I just left it at the default no targeting setting.
- Now, what I wanted to do was insert an affiliate ad to use in the slot. To do so, I created a new “Order” by clicking on the (not surprisingly) Orders tab. I then clicked on New Order and added the details of my ad. Watch out here, as mine defaulted to start tomorrow. This confused me initially when I couldn’t see any ads. You can also set pricing here, but for this ad, there was no price (it was my ad I was placing). There’s one setting on this page to really pay attention to, labelled “Value CPM”. Think of this as “Fake Value”! What it does is “pretend” that the ad is set to, say, $3 CPM, even though it’s real cost is, in this case, zero. This also works in association with AdSense. If you’re getting $2.50 CPM on AdSense and you want your own ad to take precedence, simply enter the “Value CPM” as some higher value. Neat.
- That’s just about it. Grab the code it generates for you - there’s a chunk to place between the <head> tags and some more to ad for each ad “placement” and you’re set.
This is not meant to be an extensive tutorial, but will hopefully get your started. There’s a huge amount of functionality that I haven’t even touched upon yet, like reporting, checking for free ad slots etc. I’ll save those for another day.
Anyone else using the Ad Manager? What do you think of it?
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Scrolling Google AdSense ads and a broken image uploader
I see that Google are now showing the scrolling AdSense ads on all their text ad blocks now. I’m not a great fan of the arrows - they stand out like a sore thumb. Worse still, you don’t even get paid if a visitor clicks on anything other than the initially loaded ads! Seems like a win-win for Google and a loss for web site owners!
What do you reckon? I think they’re plain ugly.
Following on from my post about Wordpress 2.5, I’m loving it more and more as I get to know it. There are some teething problems, as you’d expect of anything this size. The latest gotcha is that the WP-ContactForm breaks the image uploader. Instead of the nice new whizzy uploader, you now get:
Which is not terribly useful. The workaround is to disable WP-ContactForm if you need to upload an image, then re-enable it once you’re done. I’m using cformII here on Psionmark, so will look at integrating that into my other blogs.
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Gmail updates
I’ve noticed since yesterday that Gmail has been updated. It definitely has a “snappier” feel to it, so I guess they’ve implemented the message pre-loading that’s been mentioned on their blog. There also seems to be a slight colour change to various sections (i.e. the message labels when, say, archiving an email) and the popup when hovering the mouse over a contact in the email list has changed. I also notice I’ve now got an “Older version” link at the top of the page.
It’s curious that they haven’t notified users with their usual “New features” link. Perhaps they’re still rolling out.
Ironically, it’s now quicker to use the web app version of Gmail than it is to use their recent IMAP implementation through Thunderbird!
It’s good to see that Google are still developing Gmail. Who knows? One day we might even lose the Beta tag 
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Gmail goes IMAP!
The one final thing I’ve been wanting from Gmail has finally arrived - IMAP support! IMAP allows you to synchronise your email across different clients. So, for instance, if I’m reading a message from my Gmail account using Thunderbird and then delete it, it’s also deleted when I look at my Gmail using the Web client.
This really has changed everything for me and I can now see myself using only Gmail as my primary email account. At the moment, it only seems to be available for the Google Apps version (i.e. Gmail for domains), but I assume it will be rolled out to all accounts eventually.
Here’s a screenshot of the new Settings page:
Well done Google
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More Gmail storage on the way
Good news for everyone struggling with the “paltry” 2.9Gb Google give us for Gmail - they’re upping the storage for “everyone”, but don’t appear to be letting on by how much:
In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our “Infinity+1″ storage plan. At that time, we realized we’d never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able. That said, a few of you are using Gmail so much that you’re running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we’re announcing we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage.
I’m intrigued by people who’re near the storage limit with their accounts. I consider myself a pretty heavy email user and I’m only at around 400Mb. Are they backing up their entire photographic collection in their accounts? (From one of the comments on the original article, that might not be far from the truth!).
Read the rest of the post here.
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