Introduction to advertising with Ad Manager

An overview to introduce the Ad Manager basics

Google Ad Manager is a comprehensive hosted ad serving platform that streamlines your ad management, whether you deliver ads to websites, mobile webpages, mobile apps, games, or a combination. Ad Manager offers a complete toolkit to manage your ads for a multi-screen audience, including:

  • One central place to traffic all of your ad networks, apps, games, and sites.
  • Advanced forecasting to give you a better sense of how many impressions you will have available to sell to your direct advertisers.
  • Total revenue optimization that allows Google AdSense and Google Ad Exchange to compete against other networks in real-time, so you'll get the most revenue for every ad impression.

Your Ad Manager network

When you sign in to Ad Manager, you're signing in to a particular network. Most publishers use a single Ad Manager network to manage all of their advertising across all of their content. Your Ad Manager network is where you define your inventory and create, manage, and report on your advertising campaigns.

How Ad Manager delivers ads

Each piece of inventory you create in Ad Manager — called an ad unit — can be targeted by one or more ad campaigns. These ad units represent spaces in your content where you intend to deliver ads.

For each ad unit, Ad Manager generates ad tags, which are snippets of HTML or JavaScript code. You place these tags into your webpages and mobile apps. When a user visits your content, the tags identify each ad unit and request ads from Ad Manager.

For each ad request, Ad Manager chooses the best ad from among the campaigns you've created, delivers the ad, and records the event. If the user clicks on the ad, Ad Manager records that too. With customizable reports, Ad Manager shows you which ads served to which inventory, how many clicks they got, and much more.

Watch related Publisher University training

When Ad Manager delivers ads to mobile apps, the process is similar to delivering ads on the web. The key difference is that mobile apps use the Google Mobile Ads SDK to communicate between your apps and Ad Manager's ad servers.

Differences from Google Adsense

The basic differences between Google Ad Manager (ad server) and Google AdSense (ad network):

  Google Ad Manager Google AdSense
You can traffic other ad networks or directly sold ads Yes No
You only have to place the tags on your pages to see ads Yes, if you allow Google AdSense to show through Ad Manager Yes
You can make Google AdSense compete with other ad networks to maximize your revenue Yes No
You can have a consistent reporting among all ad serving activities Yes No
You will be paid by Ad Manager / Google AdSense No, payments come from your advertisers or ad networks, such as Google AdSense Yes
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