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Google isn't wasting any time after its $3.1 billion worth acquisition of DoubleClick. A new, free service is in the works, as reported by WSJ. It's called Google Ad Manager and it lets you manage ads on your website and make better use of your advertising inventory. The idea behind this one is that Ad Manager users will also use some of Google's AdSense ads, and I'm guessing that the service will have some special AdSense-related optimizations precisely for this purpose.
The service works this way: first, you divide your site into sections and choose portions that you want to use for adverts. Ad Manager then generates the necessary code which you can embed into your web pages. You can monitor ad impressions for specific dates, placements, and targeting and create comprehensive reports. You can see a quick tour of Ad Manager's features on the official site.
Google Ad Manager is currently in testing phase and it's available only to a small number of chosen publishers; it's available here, but you need to have an invite to test it out.
Although Ad Manager looks like a good service which will come handy to many web publishers, I'm sure that creators of all those Wordpress plugins and other applications and services for ad management won't be too happy to see it.
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