Last week Google released Ad Manager. We’ve been using Adspeed to host all of our inhouse ads on the reeftooutback.com website. Adspeed served us well for a while but I found the administrative interface poorly designed and very difficult to use. I’m a huge fan of intuitive user interfaces and Google provides that for the most part through Ad Manager. Also Adspeed was costing us $20 a month and Ad Manager is free. I will not go over all the features. I’ll focus only on the necessary ones to set up inhouse ads for your company’s website

Inventory

Once you log into Adm Manager you’ll notice four tabs at the top labeled Order, Inventory, Reports, and Admin. First lets focus on the Inventory tab. This is where you’ll set up you actual available ad slots for your website.

Click ‘Inventory’

Click ‘New Ad Slot’

Name your ad slot something descriptive like, RightColumnTop125x125. This name cannot contain any spaces. Select the size of the ads that will be displayed in this slot and fill in an optional description. You can uncheck ‘Allow AdSense ads to compete for remnant inventory’ because these are your own inhouse ads and they aren’t costing you anything, therefore it wouldn’t make sense for adspeed to compete with your own ads. Don’t worry about placements yet. We’ll get to that.

Scroll to the bottom and click Save

Placements

Now lets create a placement. Placements are groups of ad slots put together. Lets say you have one ad slot named RightColumnTop125x125 and another named RightColumnBottom125x125. You could group these two together in a placement called ‘Right Column’. Placements are useful for reporting purposes and for specifying where our creatives (our actual ads) will show up.

Click ‘Placements’

Click ‘New Placement’

Enter a name and again uncheck ‘Allow Google advertisers to target’ since these are for our inhouse ads. Below you’ll see your ad slots. ad the relevant ad slots to the placement.

Scroll to the bottom and click Save

Orders

Lets head over to the Orders section. This is where we’ll actually upload our ads.

Click ‘Orders’

Click ‘New Order’

Fill out all the fields. For Order Name put something like ‘You Company inhouse ads’. Don’t worry about external ID for now. Make sure to set end date to unlimited.

Click the ‘Advertiser’ drop down menu

Create a new advertiser with your company name

Click Save

Orders -> Line Items

Next we’ll create our line items. I like to think of line items like categories for our order. For example if you’re order may be for Toyota Cars, and your line item would be ‘Toyota Corolla’. This is important because you can only apply targeting (which we’ll get into in another article) at the line level. Inside the line we’ll place our actual ads.

Click ‘New line item’

You should be getting good at filling out these forms by now. On this page ‘Delivery Priority’ is the key field. Make sure to set it to ‘House’. This will allow you to set an unlimited end date. Also your start date must be in the future.

Below you’ll see our placements. Select which placement you want this line item to display your ads.

Scroll down and you’ll see targeting. This allows you to target your line item to specific countries, browsers, day and time, or even bandwidth. I’ll get more into the advanced features of targeting in another article.

Below targeting you can set your ‘Delivery Options’. I set Delivery rate and Creative Rotation to ‘even’ and left the other boxes unchecked.

Click Save

Orders -> Line Items -> Upload Creative

You should see a link that says ‘Needs Creatives’ in the status menu. Click this link and now we’ll upload our actual ads.

This next screen is pretty self explanatory. You can name your ad and choose the correct ad slot size. You can use flash or static images. You can even insert your own code under ‘Rich Media’. For most of you you’ll probably have a static image or flash file. If you’ve already uploaded your image/flash to a server choose ‘Standard image redirect’ or ‘Flash media redirect’ and you can put the appropriate link to the actual file. You can also specify where you want the ad to link. Manual weight will be grayed out because we’ve selected even distribution for this ad slot.

Click Save

Generate HTML

Now all we need it the actual HTML to place on our web page. Head back over to ‘Inventory’ and click ‘Generate sample HTML’. Select which ad slots you want to generate code for and click ‘Generate Sample HTML’.

The Generated HTML will show up below and you’ll notice that it’s a complete web page with head and body tags. Just copy and paste the javascript in and your done.

Remember your ads will not show up until they reach the begin date for you line item. Even then it can take 10min to an hour for Google’s cache to update itself so be patient. You’ll know everything is good when you go to your order page and see the status set to ‘Delivering’.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions please feel free to comment below.

All web developers seem to have a slightly different workflow. Last week I set out on a journey to increase my web development productivity. I’m currently using OS X Leopard 10.5.4 on a iMac 2.1GHz G5.

Coda

‘Coda‘, made by panic, is a ftp+text editor all in one. At first glance it appeared to be everything that I needed. It includes a built ftp client, css editor, subversion, Subetha Engine (which allows multiple people to edit a file collaboratively), and of course the editor. So I downloaded the 2 week trial and much to my surprise I was very impressed. The user interface is very nice and intuitive. New windows are opened up in tabs along the top (which I like but know others who hate that). Like most of these programs your remote/local file structure appears on the left side and the editor on the right. I got used to it very quickly. In fact my trial ran out 2 days ago and I have been struggling without it. The only downside is the $79 price tag, which is not a whole lot if this is what you do all day. I am a huge fan of open source, so I ventured off to find a free alternative. This is when I stumbled across the Smultron + Cyberduck marriage.

Note: If you’ve been trying to use coda with a mediatemple server and having problems with files not saving, make sure you’re using sftp. I’m not sure why this makes a difference but it it did for me. Files should upload quickly once you switch it over.

Coda Pros:

• Well designed interface
• Very intuitive
• ftp built in
• Collaborative editing of files

Coda Cons:

• High price tag
• Not as feature rich as something like ‘Textmate‘ for in depth web development

Smultron + Cyberduck

Smultron, made by Peter Borg, is a very simple but well designed text editor. It doesn’t have built in ftp so you will still need to use Cyberduck. I’m assuming most of you reading this will be well aware of Cyberduck, the free open source ftp client. Smultron fully integrates with Cyberduck allowing one click editing of any of your remote files from Cyberduck. Just use Cmd+s to save and your files are uploaded straight to your server. These two programs behave similar to Coda in this sense. The only downside being that you will have to use two programs to accomplish the same task. Smultron is a fairly basic editor and definitely doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles Coda has, but for the average coder it will do just fine. Remember this is the free solution so if your willing to  put up with this you can pocket that $79 and take your wife/girlfriend out for dinner.

Smultron Cyberduck Pros:

• Free
• Open Source
• Easy to use
• Does what its supposed to best, edit text

Sumltron Cyberduck Cons:

• File structure does not appear within Smultron
• Cyberduck is prone to crashing (at least on my computer)

Conclusion

Well I’ve been fairly even with both sides at the moment. I’d have to say that if money wasn’t an issue I would definitely go with Coda. It’s ease of use and the fact that it’s an all in one package is very attractive. I like seeing my file structure along the left hand side, something that Smultron lacks (you have to go to Cyberduck to see this). Having said that I will continue to use my Smultron Cyberduck combo until I can convince my wife to skip a date night and put the money towards Coda.

What does your workflow look like? Let me know if you have better solutions. I would love to hear from people who have used Textmate, CSSedit, TextWrangler, or any other OS X friendly text editors or ftp clients.