adsense and admanager use

befuddled by monstrosity

[coachm]

I have some compelling reasons to use admanager to deliver both adsense and other ads, and I'm amazed at the clumsiness of the system, and the lack of clear instructions and documentation. Here's my current problem (I've solved some)

I enter my adsense ads in admanager. What I want to do is track impressions and clicks through admanager AND the adsense consoles, but what I seem to get is NEITHER. Impressions are recorded in admanager but clicks aren't. It doesn't seem like clicks are recorded either on the adsense side, but I'm not sure right now.

So, I can't optimize the ads from admanager or use their innate facilities.

Does anyone know the best way to serve adsense ads through admanager?

ALso, any chance that webmasterworld would consider having a special area for discussion of admanager, since it's so complex and lacking in proper documentation and support from google?

[jhood]

Excellent idea -- an AdManager category is needed and would undoubtedly get lots of use. AdMan is indeed complex and confusing. It took me several days to get everything working more or less right. However, as far as I know, you can't measure AdSense CTR inside AdManager.

However, AdMan has some really neat capabilities, like very precise localization, that certainly make it worthwhile. I don't think there's any other free ad server that can compare.

To my chagrin, however, my eCPM plummeted just about the time I got everything tweaked in AdMan. I don't think there's a cause-and-effect relationship but it certainly added an annoyance factor to the whole effort.

I would ask the AdMan rep who kept bugging me to complete the transition by the end of September except that he told me on Sept. 29 that the reason he was rushing me was that he was being transferred to another project in October and wanted to get credit for converting me. Since then, of course, there's complete silence from his successor (if any).

[Please pardon all the "howevers." Can't believe I was an English major.]

[stuartmcdonald]

coachm,

You can see adsense impressions and clicks in Admanager by going to reports > placements > Adsense reports then you can break down the stats by date and placement... is that what you were looking for?

[coachm]

You can see adsense impressions and clicks in Admanager by going to reports > placements > Adsense reports then you can break down the stats by date and placement... is that what you were looking for?

Yes and no. Thanks, since I didn't see that before. Unfortunately, it's not tracking properly, which tells me I messed something up. Here's what I did.

I had the adsense code on all my pages for a particular size, and labelled with a channel for it. I wanted to keep the stats continuous, so when I switched to admanager, I took THAT code, and created an ad within admanager.

...and of course created a placement, adslot, etc. Then I edited my webpages and replaced the original adsense code with the new admanager code.

I don't seem to be getting impressions tracked (it should be in the thousands when I try your suggested method, but it's 17), and I'm getting no clicks reported which is clearly wrong.

So, any idea what I've done wrong, or a step by step way of getting this?

I'd love for admanager to optimize by ctr between adsense ads and other house ads, but I obviously can't do that unless the stats are working.

Any help, or pointing to help apprceciated. If you have any url to a better explanation than google provides, please private email if it's not ok to post the url publiclly.

[jhood]

I have tinkered with this quite a bit more since my posting of a few days ago and indeed, you can get very complete reports out of AdManager that allow you to get a really good handle on both AdSense and other networks, though not necessarily in a side-by-side presentation.

First, set up as many AdSense channels as you will conceivably need. More is better than fewer, as it enables you to get more granular.

Then, in AdMan, go to Inventory/Placements/Import Adsense Channels. It will list the channels you have and it's a simple matter from there to import them. Once you do, each channel becomes a placement. You can place orders from direct advertisers against each placement, enable each placement to let AdSense override other ads if it thinks it is paying more, etc.

In the Reports section, you can track CTR performance for direct orders and for AdSense, though not in the same section.

I used to group all ad units by section (automotive, personal finance, etc.) but have over the last few days set up a separate channel for each ad size and page position in each section. It's a lot of work (at least on a larger site) but it produces some surprising stats that a sectionwide average doesn't display and, over time, should make it possible to use AdMan to display the most profitable ads in each slot, on average.

As for AdMan being a monstrosity, I find it similar to other ad servers I've used (or tried to use), including TribalFusion, DoubleClick (obviously an AdMan cousin) and OpenAdsPHP. It takes a certain mindset, which I lack, to fathom the architecture behind these things but once you do so, they can be pretty valuable.

[coachm]

Thanks, Jhood. I'm trying to deal with a $7,000 adwords billing problem. I'll come back and go through your suggestions with more care, and see if I can sort it all out.

I've used Openx (phpadsnew, etc) a lot and quite used to it, but it's really different from admanager.