Hitting the wall with Google Ad manager
I Recently converted our usedeverywhere.com websites over to the Google Ad Manager (GAM) platform, but I hit a wall...
Google recommends you use no more than 1000 Ad slots. But my pilot site was running well with over 2500 ad slots and I was planning to roll out to 10+ sites, with a total of more than 25,000 possible ad slots...
I met with Google and they recommended doing this with custom targeting, using category & sub-cats. Unfortunately the targeting they proposed would not work for us, and I'd already set up the first batch of Ad slots so i posed the question: "Can your application handle 30,000 ad slots and 2500 placements?" The answer was yes, but it may slow down forecasting... so no big deal....
Well, as it turns out the real answer is NO, GAM can't handle that many Ad slots. Sure the underlying system can handle it (Doubleclick perhaps??), but the Inventory Tab becomes completely unusable and the I can no longer create new Ad Placements!
So, I then switched directions, revisited targeting and went back down a reasonable 2,500 Ad tags divided into 300 Placements and targeted by site. Now I'm just faced with having to archive the remaining 28K Ad slots left in the system, but otherwise things have worked themselves out .... The moral of the story: Never trust what SalesEngineers tell you, even if they are Google - and - always test the limits on your own.
Despite hitting the wall with Google, in over 9yrs of working with Ad serving systems, GAM is the easiest to deploy and teach others to use... and I will eventually look at deploying GAM system wide. ;)
Google recommends you use no more than 1000 Ad slots. But my pilot site was running well with over 2500 ad slots and I was planning to roll out to 10+ sites, with a total of more than 25,000 possible ad slots...
I met with Google and they recommended doing this with custom targeting, using category & sub-cats. Unfortunately the targeting they proposed would not work for us, and I'd already set up the first batch of Ad slots so i posed the question: "Can your application handle 30,000 ad slots and 2500 placements?" The answer was yes, but it may slow down forecasting... so no big deal....
Well, as it turns out the real answer is NO, GAM can't handle that many Ad slots. Sure the underlying system can handle it (Doubleclick perhaps??), but the Inventory Tab becomes completely unusable and the I can no longer create new Ad Placements!
So, I then switched directions, revisited targeting and went back down a reasonable 2,500 Ad tags divided into 300 Placements and targeted by site. Now I'm just faced with having to archive the remaining 28K Ad slots left in the system, but otherwise things have worked themselves out .... The moral of the story: Never trust what SalesEngineers tell you, even if they are Google - and - always test the limits on your own.
Despite hitting the wall with Google, in over 9yrs of working with Ad serving systems, GAM is the easiest to deploy and teach others to use... and I will eventually look at deploying GAM system wide. ;)
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