If you run advertising on your website then you should get excited about Google Ad Manager. It’s a new service that Google has created to help web publishers manage their ad inventory and optimize it so that you make the most money for the space available. If you’re making $5 eCPM when you could be making $50 eCPM, what impact would that have on your business?

It’s exclusive at the moment and difficult to get in, however. I applied twice and never got a response. So I started pulling connections. I contacted everyone I knew at Google and one of my contacts got me on the beta this afternoon. My site serves over 1 million ad impressions every month so keeping up with it all can be very difficult. I tried installing openX but then found out that my version of MYSQL was too high for openX to handle (come on openX – get your act together). I end up running everything from an Excel spreadsheet which became very time consuming and prone to error if I didn’t triple check everything.

Enter Google Ad Manager. You can create campaigns for each section of your site, it gives you detailed reports on how each ad is performing, and you can optimize them so if private ads are pulling better than AdSense (or vice-versa) it will show the ads that bring you the most money.

When you first get access, it’s a lot to take in. There are so many features but they do a good job of giving video tutorials on how to use all the tools. I’m not much of a read the manual kind of guy and prefer to figure it out on my own but the videos are very well done and worth watching.

The one thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to create monthly campaigns. Most of my advertisers buy an exclusive ad spot for a month at a time. They essentially sponsor an entire section at a time. I bill them monthly and show the ad. Google Ad Manager allows you to sell ads by a CPM or CPC model. They also allow a CPD model (Cost per Day) but I’ve yet to figure out how to make it recurring.

I’m excited to be on the program and test it out. I only had an hour to review it before leaving the office so there’s still a lot to discover. Every entrepreneur should always be on the lookout for ways to create systems and make processes more efficient. I’m betting that Google Ad Manager will be a must have for any website owner if they plan on making money by selling advertising.

I’ll keep you posted as I learn more about the tool. Does anyone have any of their own experiences with Google Ad Manager?