Google Ad Manager

Google Ad Manager is Google's ad server and supply-side platform for publishers who sell their own ad space. Prebid trafficking is web display only.

Google Ad Manager is an ad server and supply-side platform for publishers who sell advertising against their own websites and apps. It handles both halves of that business: campaigns the publisher's own sales team booked, and impressions bought at auction. Google builds and runs it at admanager.google.com as a product for publishers rather than for advertisers, and Ad Manager 360 is the tier sold under contract. The company behind it is Google LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet. Campaigns are booked as line items with start and end dates, targeted by geography, device type and publisher-defined key values, and capped so one reader sees an advertiser's creative only so often. Forecasting estimates the impressions available for a date range before a deal is signed. On the programmatic side the same inventory carries Programmatic Guaranteed, reserved deals traded with a buyer's DSP at a fixed price. Open Bidding runs that auction on Google's servers, Prebid trafficking brings a header bidding wrapper's demand into the same decision, and Pricing rules set the floors by buyer, geography and device. In-app placements are sold through the Google Mobile Ads SDK, and email newsletters through a beta of newsletter ad serving. Ad quality controls block malicious ad content before it reaches a page. It fits publishers big enough to sell some of their inventory themselves and to place the rest programmatically: news and media sites, app developers, and anyone whose revenue depends on what a placement earns. Ad operations staff are the daily users, with engineering involved once to place the tags and the SDK. Google's own home page tells publishers they need an AdSense account alongside it. What a publisher pays turns on monthly impression volume rather than on seats. Day to day it sits at the centre of the stack: the wrapper on the page and the SDK in the app send their requests to it, and Google's demand competes there with the campaigns the sales team sold. Header bidding trafficking through Prebid applies to web display, and a publisher's AdSense account sits alongside the same inventory. The job it takes on is the small one repeated on every page request: choosing which ad wins, and recording what it paid.