Best Ad Managers

AdSpeed is a hosted ad management service with fast and reliable servers, affordable plans, and fairly easy-to-use interface. The reason I chose this particular company for my new website is that they offered all the features I wanted: powerful ad targeting (by country, city, browser / device, frequency), ability to show only geotargeted ads to visitors from countries of my choice, support for Flash and rich media ads, and, perhaps most importantly, low cost. They also offer a Wordpress plugin, but I haven't tried that.

Using AdSpeed is simple: you create an ad Zone (such as 300x250), set up some Ads and their Restrictions (aka targeting), link them to the new Zone, an grab the serving code (iframe or JavaScript). Put the AdSpeed code on your website, and it will serve targeted advertising to your visitors. AdSpeed has a superb help desk with lots of useful articles, and you can also play around with their Demo for as long as you want.

Note: if you are using a contextual ad network (such as AdSense or Amazon Omakase) you will have to choose "JavaScript only" serving code, so the ad network would see your site as the referrer. Choosing iframe makes adspeed.net the referrer and the ad network won't be able to serve relevant ads.

Price: free plan gives you up to 10,000 impressions a month (if you exceed it, AdSpeed will start displaying their own ads on your site 10% of the time). Free 10-day trial offers 50,000 impressions. Paid plans start from 100,000 impressions for $9.95 / mo.

[ Try AdSpeed now... ] full disclosure: this is my affiliate link

OpenX is big in the admanager world. You might recall them being called phpAdsNew before. They have evolved since then into three different products: OpenX OnRamp (hosted, free ad manager), OpenX Enterprise (costly solution for big companies, starting at $1,200 / mo) and OpenX Source (ad management software that you install on your own server). Since I'm reviewing hosted ad managers on this page, I'll only describe my experience with OnRamp here. I'll only say that if you decide to use OpenX Source, be careful installing it on shared hosting, as it can use up quite a lof of CPU and RAM.

OpenX OnRamp is free if you're delivering less than 100 million ad impressions a month (which is pretty much impossible to exceed for a small website like mine). It also has every feature you can imagine: geotargeting, advertiser, zone, and channel management, default ads for when you have no "premium" ones to show, and so on.

One unique feature of OnRamp is their integration with OpenX Market. You can basically sell your unnecessary ad space to OpenX Market and actually make money with them! Simply opt-in to use the Market with that particular ad Zone, and set a CPM floor (such as $0.50), making OnRamp only show ads which pay more than that.

It all looks pretty good, so you might ask why I didn't choose this particular free ad management service. Truth be told, I had been using them for approximately a day, when OpenX suddenly stopped serving ads altogether. I've taken a look at their community forum, and it turns out this is a common occurrence. Their support for OnRamp is also pretty much nonexistent (because it's a free service, I expect). This has prompted me to look for an OpenX alternative, and that's when I discovered all these other free ad managers.

Price: free for up to 100,000,000 (one hundred million) impressions per month. Excess impressions will cost you $0.03 CPM.

[ Try OpenX OnRamp now... ]

TrafficSpaces is a new, fresh, pretty ad manager. Their interface is very modern and uses AJAX, so it's the easiest one to use out of all I've tried. They also provide payment integration for PayPal and credit cards, so you can charge people for advertising on your website directly. All targeting features (geotargeting, browsers and devices, frequency capping) are present. Their prices are quite affordable, too.

What's more, TrafficSpaces is offering branding for their self-service online ad manager. In other words, you can make the advertiser area (the place where potential advertisers buy ads from you) match the design of your site, making the whole thing look more professional.

So, what's the downside? If you are mostly selling advertising space to advertisers directly then you will probably love TrafficSpaces! However, if you are playing with 3rd party ad networks or affiliate ads like me, the default / fallback ad system offered by this ad manager might not be enough. You can actually enter an "Ad Feed" which will be shown when no direct advertising is available. However, Ad Feeds can't be targeted in any way - so you won't be able to, for example, show Amazon ads to US visitors, and some third-party affiliate ads to everyone else.

Price: free for up to 50,000 impressions a month. Paid plans start at $19.99 for 100,000 monthly impressions.

[ Try TrafficSpaces now... ]

AdButler is a reliable text ad, Flash, and banner ad serving tool from Sparklit. Like all the other ad managers on this page, they support geotargeting and other ad targeting features.

Their main advantages are as follows: highly affordable pricing, ability to serve ads from your own domain, option to upload images to AdButler's servers for faster loading (for a small fee), and support for pop-up and pop-under ads.

Something of a disadvantage is their unattractive and sometimes clunky user interface. The reason that I've personally decided not to use them is that you can't set AdButler up to serve only targeted ads to target countries. For example, if you have a US-targeted ad #1, and an untargeted ad #2, visitors from US will see them both, and there's no way to prevent ad #2 from showing to them. if that isn't a problem for you, you might want to give AdButler a try, especially since it offers the cheapest paid ad management subscription.

Price: free with AdButler showing their own advertisements on your ad spots 7.5% of the time. Paid plans start at $5.95 / mo with $0.40 CPM cost, or $11.95 / mo for 50,000 monthly impressions.

[ Try AdButler now... ] full disclosure: this is my affiliate link

BittAds is a Netherlands-based ad management solution with lots of features, fast support, an XML API for integrating ads with your videos or content, and a Wordpress plugin. They allow you to target your ads by a number of conditions, give your advertisers separate logins to track their stats, and provide detailed reports. Basically, they have everything most people are looking for in an ad manager.

Price: Free Edition lets you use up to 10 million impressions a month, but you are limited to 10 concurrent ads. Standard Edition has a base fee of €90 / mo and BittAds charges you on a per-CPM basis.

It seems like a high quality solution for managing your ads. The reason why I didn't choose BittAds for my website was that while 10 million impressions a month is way more than I need, I wanted to be able to use more than 10 ads at once (and 90 euro a month for the paid edition was a bit too pricy, especially considering I'd never use up all those impressions). Since my website has both 300x250 and 468x60 ad zones, I'd be limited to just 5 ads per zone.

If you do not plan on rotating that many ads, then the free BittAds edition might be just what you're looking for.

[ Try BittAds now... ]

ShinyAds is the only ad manager on this page that I haven't tried personally, so I have to rely on the publicly available information. It seems to be a very popular self-serve advertising solution used by big websites like DeviantArt and GameSpot. One of its best aspects is a powerful and user-friendly storefront where advertisers can easily pick advertising options by website, ad size, pricing structure (clicks or impressions), pay for them, and get the ads running automatically.

If you run a website with lots of direct advertisers and want to save time, ShinyAds just might be the thing you need. Your clients will be able to setup everything themselves without you having to do anything. In addition to automatic payment processing, ShinyAds also includes a quick ad maker for those who don't have a banner ready at hand.

All in all, their front-end for potential advertisers is top-notch, but it looks like instead of serving the ads themselves, ShinyAds integrates with existing ad servers, like OpenX. That means in addition to running ShinyAds (which processes self-serve advertising) you also need to run an ad server (which actually shows the ads on your website).

Price: have to contact ShinyAds to get a quote.