The new application is called Ad Manager. It's a free hosted ad management solution that Google says helps you " sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory."

If you are unfamiliar with ad server software, the beauty of such software is that once it's set up, it lets you change ads within specified areas of your website without having to touch those web pages.

I haven't yet seen the Google Ad Manager in action, but, as an example, an ad serving program we use on Business Know-How let's us do things like set up three ads to display in the same spot on the page (say the top of the page), displaying each ad a certain number of times over a set period of time. We can set the total number of ad impressions that should be served, and indicate whether the ads should be served equally over the month or just ongoing until the number of impressions is reached.

When a new month rolls along, if we want to replace the original ads with three new ads, we just go back to the ad serving program, tell it what ads to dislay this month in the allocated space.. and that's it. We do not have to put new code on thousands of pages.

From the demo pages, it looks like the Google Ad Manager will have similar capabilities. Since the ads will be served from Google servers, the web publisher won't have to worry about installing any software on their site, and since it's free to use, they won't have to buy software or pay per-click fees some other hosted solutions charge.

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