NPMMO Google Ad Manager Meeting Recap

Tonight was the Google Ad Manager Nebraska People Making Money Online meeting presented by Tigh and Jeremy at the new SMG offices here in Lincoln. It ended up being the best meeting that I've been to yet because only 5 of us were there (Jeremy, Tigh, Browie, some dude, and me)...it made for a nice small group. I'm not sure if people just couldn't make it or if they couldn't find Jeremy's new digs. I have to admit, it is pretty hard to find if you don't already know where it is.

Anyway, I learned the ins and outs of how to manage ad campaigns with Google Ad Manager. Really though, the interesting thing was learning how Jeremy and Tigh manage ads for shoemoney.com. They take a simple approach to ad management and offer different ad slots for 30 or 90 days for a flat fee. IMO, CPM or CPC is just too complex for a small operation to manage so it really makes sense for bloggers and small companies to manage their ads this way. The only thing that I really didn't know how to do yet was to rotate ads in a group you just add the ad slots to the same placement. You could use this technique to rotate different adsense variations or show different ads in the same slot (just add multiple ads to the same slot).

The Ad Manager presentation was great but the best part of the meeting for me when it was was over and we just talked about a bunch of stuff for the next hour or so. We talked about Jeremy's new project, fighters.com, his old project nextpimp.com and a lot of stuff he's done between the two. I'm not going to share in detail what I learned because frankly my head still spinning a bit from all of it. I guess the biggest thing I learned was that traffic drives $$$ so if you are in development for the cash you'd better pick something that is going to generate a lot of traffic. That's not really any kind of secret but it just really hit home for me tonight.