AdSense Introduce ServerSide Ad Management

Late last week I took a call from an AdSense rep asking if I’d like to test a new feature that would enable publishers to make changes to their AdSense ads without having to manually change the code on their sites. She called it ‘Serverside’ ad management.

I said yes and the it became available to me yesterday in my AdSense account. I wasn’t going to mention it (because testing new stuff is confidential) but AdSense just announced that it’s coming soon on their blog with a post Coming soon: Make ad changes without replacing code – so I guess I’m free to talk about it!

This is a very useful feature that many publishers have been asking for (for years).

The only real downside that I can see with it so far is that switching over to this style of ‘managing ads’ does take some effort in that to do it you need to replace your old AdSense ad code over to new code. This takes time – particularly if you have a lot of sites with a lot of different ad units.

However once you’ve done it the upsides are huge in that there’s no more digging around in the back end of your blog’s templates to make changes to ad design – you simply log into your AdSense account and make the changes there and the changes will be instantly reflected on your blog.

Those of you who use WidgetBucks will have seen this type of ad management there as they do the same thing by default.

Publishers who are not part of the beta test won’t be able to see this new feature yet – but it’ll be rolled out over the coming weeks. You’ll find it (when you’re upgraded) under your AdSense Setup tab on a new ‘Manage Ads’ option.