As a brand or publisher, you will want to acquire the most bang for your buck when it comes to PPC advertising. Besides, why do you have to pay more for ads when Google Ads Manager can help you both earn more from ads and grow your business simultaneously?
Well, buying and selling ads and ad space can be difficult. Your business might work closely with some advertisers and use ad networks such as Google AdSense and Amazon Advertising for others. However, managing all these networks can be a huge task to take on. That is where Google Ad Manager (GAM) comes into play. Thankfully, this article will give you a complete guide on how to set up a Google Ad Manager for your blogs and affiliate marketing business.
Google ad manager is a total ad management platform often used by publishers with a reasonable number of direct sales. It facilitates the buying and selling of ads across several ad networks and locations, including Ad Sense. Also, it gives advertisers a greater chance to increase competition for ads by managing ads and ad space across different ad networks. No doubt, it is a vital advertising tool for any business that wants to take its ad monetization to a higher level. Although Google Ad Manager is often used in the publishing industry, it is still very much applicable to many other industries like blogging and affiliate marketing.
What is Google Ad Manager?
Google Ad Manager is a web service that helps you manage banner ads. Also, it comes with a complete inventory report module. Google Ad manager forms into one whole with Google AdSense; therefore, web admins are cable of serving AdSense ads if there’s no banner for any specific slot.
Advantages of Google Ad Manager
The advantages of Google Ad manager include the following:
- Ad targeting ability
Google Ad manager allows you to control who gets to see the ads. Also, you can make it geographical, browser, or language specific.
- Efficient ad serving
It does not need any script installation as everything you require, including the creative, is hosted with Google. Not only does it saves you space and bandwidth, but you can also be very confident that the banners will deliver banners on time.
- Multi-user supported
You can assign several salespersons to be in charge of the sales part and then have everything documented and recorded nicely inside Google Ad Manager.
- Simple user Interface
Like any other Google web service, the Google Ad Manager interface is simple and easy to understand.
Now, if you’re confident that Google Ad Manager will help manage advertisements for your blog or affiliate marketing business in the long run, here is a step-by-step guide on getting it set up right from scratch.
Create an Ad Slot
Ad slots are spaces reserved on your site for ad placements. If you perhaps want to put 4 125×125 banners on your sidebar, then you should be looking at creating 4 ad slots.
- The first step is to set up an inventory or Ad slot by clicking on New Ad Slots.
- Compulsory fields: it is best to give your slot a unique Ad slot name. After which, you can choose the size of the banner drop-down or create one if you like. Also, select if the banner should open a new window or open on the current window upon clicking.
- Optional fields: you can check the AdSense checkbox to maximize revenue on the slot with AdSense; however, it is advisable to wait to do it at the initial stage. Fill in a friendly and meaningful description for the Ad Slot, or you can skip this if your Ad slot name is self-descriptive enough.
- Save it.
If you’re creating more than one ad slot, repeat steps 1, 2, and 3 to create all of them.
Create a placement
If you have more than one ad slot, Ad Placements helps to hold or group all your ad slots. Also, ad placement ensures that each ad gets a fair shot of being in the top position if set on rotational. Here’s how you can create ad placement.
- Under Inventory, click on Placements, and then click on New Placement.
- Compulsory fields: The next step is giving your ad placement a meaningful name.
- Optional fields: in case you allow AdSense to bid for ad slots in this placement, it is essential to check for Targeting or uncheck. Usually, the Internal Description is for personal use only to let you understand your ad placements better.
- You can also add all ad slots to this new ad placement you’ve created.
Create orders
Orders are just like banner order requests. Not only does it store information about who the advertisers are, but also the start and end date of the ad campaigns and more. If an advert places an order for a banner ad on your website or blog, you create a new Order. Depending on the number of ad slots you created, expect to create that same amount of Orders. Let’s create some Orders.
- Under Orders, click on New Order.
- Compulsory fields: name each other with an Order name and External ID you can easily recognize. Also, choose a start and end date to let the system know when the banner will start and end. You can choose unlimited if it’s likely to be permanent.
- Optional fields: You could also fill up the Advertiser, Contacts, Agency, User Assignments, and Notes to enable you to understand the Order better.
- Save it.
After this, you can now create a line item for this Order.
Line item
Line Items are in conjunction with Order. Every time an Order is entered, you’ll be required to create a Line Item. Line item enables you to determine the nature of the ad, so give it a name that explains what the ad is and the location it is displayed, to make it easier to work with them and indicate whether it’s serving as CPC, CPM, or CPD. Lastly, set the cost/price for the ad here.
You’ll be directed to create a Line item whenever you click the Save button after creating an Order.
- Click on New line items
- Give it a Name.
- Determine how urgent the delivery is. Change to exclusive from a drop-down box. If your order is a direct order your Line Item can use CPD (Cost per Day).
- Also, ensure that you’ve correctly entered the start and end dates.
- Under the Placement section, associate with its respective placement.
- The Targeting section lets you control who sees the ad In other words, under what condition will the ad appear on your website? However, this setting is optional by default and will be seen by all.
- The Delivery Options section will determine the appearance of the ad
- Save it.
The next step is to set up creative
Creative
Creative are ad images. Whenever a Line Item is added, you’ll be required to add at least one creative.
- After you’ve saved a Line item, click on need creative to add an image for the ad
- Then fill up the Name, Ad slot size, Creative type, Manual Weight
- Save it.
Creative type
This will determine how you serve the banner image. Google Ad Manager can host your banners internally; regardless of jpg, flash, or gif. You can, on the other hand, host them elsewhere and insert the image URL. Remember to approve and activate the creative.
Display banners.
This is the final step before ads show on your website – here, you’re to generate the codes and paste them inside the source codes.
- Go to Inventory, click on Ad Slots, then click on Generate Sample HTML.
- Add all slots needed to be in the selected items section
- Click Generate Sample HTM.
- Then scroll to the end to find your generated codes.
Conclusion
Depending on your product offering and website, you’ll need to decide if running ads on your site is a good idea for your business. Although the revenue from ads can seem like a nice bonus initially, you need to ensure you’re not moving your customers’ eyes away from your content and products. Even more important, you need to be sure that your competitors aren’t buying up space on your website and undercutting you!
Find out how you can the most out of your Google Ads advertising budget by making use of our Sunshine Coast Google Ads Management services. Contact SEO Web Logistics today.