Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been struggling with Ad Manager for a little while now. I like the idea of it, and it strikes me that Google has ahold of about half a good product there. So for those of you who have been working with it, if you have features you'd like to see, post them here, or if you know how to help out with other issues, you can post that too.
My first list:
- Respond to support issues in a timely manner. I have had an open issue about importing my AdSense channels for MONTHS. Every now and then I drop another email and they tell me engineering is still looking into it. If you can't figure it out, just say so.
- Why isn't Ad Manager more AdSense friendly yet? It doesn't cover placements for ad links? Why isn't there some kind of a built in rotator function to evenly serve differently styled AdSense blocks in the same placement? I have to do it myself with PHP.
- The download / upload system for ad slots is severely borked. First of all, if you put a few ad slots in by hand, and then download them in a CSV file, it would be natural to assume you could edit that file, add a bunch of new ad slots, and upload the same file back up - but you can't! it doesn't work. The BulkSampleAdSlots.csv file has an extra column for Placement Names. Why doesn't the download CSV have that column too?
- Along the same lines are the cryptic error messages when it doesn't want to accept your bulk upload file. Tells me parse errors on random lines. The only thing different is one word in the ad slot name. What parse error? Is there a limit to the length of the names? There's nothing in the doc for that. I created the file from scratch, I used the download file (after adding the Placement Names row) and I pasted my data directly into the Bulk sample file - still the same parse errors.
The worst thing about it is that if, at any point, you run into an error or stopping point with *one* thing, however small, it stops your whole program. For example, I was trying to upload hundreds of ad slots, but it didn't like eight. So it wouldn't upload ANY.
I tried to import my existing channels (I have a lot of those too) and it didn't like *one* (says it already existed in the account, when it didn't) so it wouldn't import any of them.
And that's just the AdSense portion of it. More later.
