Google Ad Manager - can anyone share experience?

We use OpenX to manage our banner ads on Forumosa. OpenX (formerly known as phpMyAds and [wikipedia]phpAdsNew[/wikipedia]) is a complete ad system - it’s great in many ways. I have two issues with it: it’s complicated and a bit unwieldy.

I believe we use only a fraction of OpenX’s capabilities, but only those that allow us to serve ads. I guess that’s all we really need, right? Because it seems to complex, I’m not encouraged to invest the time to learn how to make the most of it. By unwieldy, I mean that it consumes a lot of server resources. There used to be a bug in the early versions of it that we used that crashed the entire the server whenever someone (surely not me :wink:) would click the statistics module. If we were careful, we could call up the stats for individual campaigns, but if we requested a sitewide report, the website (forums, Taiwanted, Taiwanease, etc) would grind to a halt for 3 or 4 hours.

We are long due for an upgrade of OpenX. Perhaps it is simpler and more efficient today than our current version. However, I’m open to new and simpler ideas. A Google search for “OpenX Alternatives” resulted in two possibilities: OASIS and Google Ad Manager.

Google Ad Manager

Google Ad Manager is intriguing partly because I am a longtime fan of Google apps (simple, clear, linked to our Google accounts), and partly because we (the Forumosa admins) are turning more and more to hosted services for solutions these days – using Google apps offers a security and maintenance upkeep that I am happy to outsource, especially at the price they offer (free). While using a hosted solution like Google Ad Manager does not mean any savings on bandwidth for us, it should help lighten the load and risk to our server if we completely migrate from OpenX.

Please let me know any thoughts or experience you can share about Google Ad Manager. Or recommend another alternative to OpenX.

some of my friends also use google ad manager, and most of them are satisfied with it.
the best part of google ad manager is you don’t have to waste your own server’s resource :slight_smile:
Just give it a try :thumbsup: