Free to serve, every sale by hand
Google Ad Manager is free at small-site volumes, and it serves what you have already sold. It has no portal where advertisers buy for themselves, so every campaign is an order and a line item you build by hand, and Google's publisher policies decide who you are allowed to run.
Free covers the serving. It does not cover the selling.Google publishes a monthly impression allowance for the free tier, well above what a small site serves, and above it Ad Manager 360 applies, which Google does not price publicly. What the free tier does not include is anybody to take the order. The line item, the creative, the invoice and the chasing are still yours, for every advertiser. More context in Google Ad Manager for small sites. Checked 16 September 2026.
What Google Ad Manager is
Google's ad server, and the one a very large part of the web runs on. You define your inventory, create orders and line items, traffic the creatives, and the server decides what to serve on every request. For direct-sold campaigns, at the volumes here, it is free.
It is built for the person doing the ad ops. Every screen assumes somebody who knows what a line item priority is and has the hours to spend there. On most small sites, that person is you.
Keep it running underneath if it is earning. This is not an argument for ripping anything out, it is an argument for owning the deals you sell yourself.
What Pyrobid is
A white-label self-serve ad server. Your advertisers get a portal on your own domain, with your logo, where they build a campaign, target it, pay for it and watch it run. You approve the creative and keep all of the money.
The serving underneath is built to be understood in a minute. Every slot has a floor price, bids above it split delivery in proportion to what they bid, and anything below it falls through to your fallback tag. That is the whole model, and how it works explains it in a page.
What it takes out of your week is the sale itself: no order to build, no invoice to send, no payment to chase. Prices are on pricing, both plans, nothing held back as an add-on.
What free does not buy you
Ad Manager traffics what you have already sold. It does not sell it, brand it, or take the money.
Advertisers can buy without you in the room
Nobody signs up to Ad Manager, funds an account, uploads a creative and goes live. Somebody emails you, you traffic it by hand, and you invoice them afterwards. Pyrobid is a shop front in your name that does all of that at two in the morning while you are asleep.
The money arrives with the booking
Card payments, balances, vouchers and receipts are part of the product, so a campaign starts because somebody paid for it. With Ad Manager the billing is entirely yours: your invoice, your chasing, your reconciliation, every month, for every advertiser.
Your name on it, not Google's
Your logo, your colours, your domain, your prices. An advertiser sees your business and deals with your business, and the relationship stays yours instead of being a line in somebody else's console.
Selling this afternoon
Sign up, add a zone, paste one tag. No approval queue, no policy review, no account manager, and nobody else deciding whether your audience is worth serving.
Google Ad Manager has no self-serve advertiser portal.There is no page where an advertiser signs up, picks your homepage leaderboard, sets a budget, uploads a banner, pays and goes live. Ad Manager is a tool for the publisher, not a shopfront for the buyer, and Google has never presented it as one. If you want self-serve buying on top of GAM you build it yourself against the API, which is a real software project with a real maintenance bill. That is the gap this page is about, and it is the same gap behind DanAds and AdButler. Our side of it is on capabilities. Checked 16 September 2026.
Side by side
Google Ad Manager details are from Google's published Ad Manager documentation, accessed 16 September 2026. Where Google publishes no figure, the cell says so.
$29.99/mo
|
Google Ad ManagerFree tier | |
|---|---|---|
| Commercials | ||
| Entry price | $29.99/mo to 1M impressions | Free at small-site volumes |
| Next tier up | $99.99/mo to 5M impressions | Ad Manager 360, not published |
| Free trial | 14 days | Free tier, no trial needed |
| Revenue share on your direct deals | None, ever, stated | None stated for the free tier |
| Getting an account | Card, self-serve, no approval | Google account, policies apply |
| Selling to advertisers | ||
| Self-serve advertiser portal | Included on both plans | None |
| Who builds the campaign | The advertiser | You |
| Advertiser pays inside the product | ✓ | Handled outside, by you |
| Your branding on the buying journey | ✓ | No buying journey to brand |
| Payment methods | Bank, invoice, cash, stablecoin, vouchers | Not part of the product |
| Advertiser sees their own reporting | ✓ | You export and send it |
| Ad serving | ||
| Line items, priorities, goals | Campaigns and flights, simpler | Deep and priority based |
| Availability forecasting | Not offered | ✓ |
| Competitive exclusions and roadblocks | Not offered | ✓ |
| Programmatic and header bidding demand | Not offered | ✓ |
| Country, region and city targeting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Device, day-part and 24 hour frequency capping | ✓ | ✓ |
| Your existing ads kept as fallback | ✓ | Handled as house or network line items |
| Policy | ||
| Who approves your advertisers | You do | Google publisher policies apply |
| Crypto, cannabis and gambling advertisers | Supported, said out loud | Subject to Google policy |
| Appeal route if a decision goes against you | A support ticket to us | Google's process |
Where Pyrobid wins
Two things, really. Advertisers can buy without you, and nobody else decides who you may sell to.
Advertisers buy without you in the loop
Your portal, your domain, your logo. An advertiser lands on your Advertise Here page, signs up, funds an account, builds a campaign and uploads a creative. You approve it. That is the whole sale, and none of it was a line item you built at eleven at night.
You stop being the trafficking department
In Ad Manager every campaign is your work: the order, the line item, the creative, the dates, and the rebuild when the advertiser wants a different banner on Thursday. At three campaigns that is fine. At thirty it is a job you did not apply for.
Restricted verticals, stated in writing
Crypto, cannabis, gambling and adult-adjacent publishers are supported and we say so publicly. Google publisher policies apply to inventory you monetise through Google products, so for those verticals GAM is a hard stop rather than a negotiation. Check the current policy yourself: it is Google's to change, not ours.
Money moves the way you want it to
Take payment by bank transfer, invoice, cash or stablecoin, then issue a voucher that redeems as ad credit in the portal. No merchant account is needed and no card processor gets an opinion about your industry. Ad Manager does not handle advertiser billing at all, so this is yours to solve either way.
The buying journey carries your brand
Advertisers see your name on the portal, the invoices and the reports. Not ours, and not Google's. For a publisher whose pitch is the relationship with the audience, that matters more than it sounds like it should.
No revenue share on your direct deals
Ever, on either plan. You keep what you charge. We sell software and that is the entire business model, which is why we have nothing to gain from sitting between you and your advertiser.
What your advertisers see
Your brand, on your own domain. They sign up, fund an account and build a campaign in five steps. You approve the artwork before anything runs.
Illustration of step one of the advertiser campaign builder, on your own domain under your branding.
A screenshot is still only a picture. The demo is the running product, read only, with the login published and nothing to install.
Your network keeps what you do not sell
Every ad request runs down a chain. Your direct deals get first refusal at your price. Anything unsold falls through to what you run today.
Choose Pyrobid if
- ›You want advertisers to buy without you touching it
- ›You sell to crypto, cannabis, gambling or another restricted vertical
- ›You would rather pay $29.99 than do trafficking admin every week
- ›You want your own brand on the whole buying journey
- ›You want to take payment by transfer, invoice or stablecoin
Common questions
Is Google Ad Manager free?
Yes, for most small publishers. There is a monthly impression allowance on the free tier, and it sits well above what a small site serves, so in practice you will not hit it. Above that line Ad Manager 360 applies and Google does not publish 360 pricing. We are deliberately not quoting the allowance figure here because it has changed before; look up Google's current published number rather than trusting a comparison page for it.
Does Google Ad Manager have a self-serve portal for advertisers?
No. Ad Manager is a publisher-side tool. There is no advertiser-facing shopfront where somebody signs up, funds an account and builds a campaign without you. You can build one against the API, but that is a software project you then own. This is the single biggest difference between the two products and it is the reason this page exists.
Why would I pay $29.99 a month when GAM is free?
For the part Ad Manager leaves to you. It serves a campaign once somebody has built it. Pyrobid lets the advertiser build it, pay for it and go live without you, under your brand, including advertisers Google's policies will not let you run. One direct sale a month above $29.99 covers it, and your GAM or AdSense tag stays underneath for what you have not sold.
Can I run Pyrobid and Google Ad Manager at the same time?
Yes, and plenty of people should. A common setup is Pyrobid on the one or two placements you sell directly, with your GAM or AdSense tag as the fallback underneath. Our fallback code runs in the page rather than in an iframe, so Google fills normally when a slot goes unsold. Nothing in Google's programme policies requires exclusivity.
Is Pyrobid a better ad server than Google Ad Manager?
For selling, yes. Ad Manager is a trafficking console for an ad ops team. Pyrobid is how a publisher sells, brands and gets paid without one. The two run together: your GAM tag stays underneath as the fallback.
I sell crypto or gambling ads. Can I use Google Ad Manager?
Google publisher policies apply to inventory you monetise through Google products, including campaigns you sold yourself and trafficked in Ad Manager. For several restricted verticals that is a hard stop rather than something you negotiate. Read the current policy before you build anything on top of it, because it is Google's document and Google changes it. That policy exposure is why we exist for those publishers.
What the advertiser actually touches
The screen on the left is the real product, on a live tenant. The right is what an advertiser gets from Google Ad Manager.
Google Ad Manager
Ad Manager has no self-serve advertiser portal, and it is not trying to have one. It is a trafficking system for an ad ops team: you build the order, you build the line item, you upload the creative, you set the dates, for every campaign, by hand.
Keep Google. Add the portal on top.
Fourteen days free, $29.99 a month after that, and your Ad Manager or AdSense tag keeps filling underneath the whole time.
Start free trial14 days free. Your existing ads keep running. Cancel anytime.
Google Ad Manager details were taken from Google's published Ad Manager and publisher policy documentation on 16 September 2026. We have deliberately not quoted the free tier impression allowance: the figure has moved before, and a stale number here would be worse than none, so check Google's current published limit yourself. Ad Manager 360 pricing is not published anywhere we could find, which is why every 360 cell says so rather than guessing. Pyrobid figures are our own list prices, current on the same date.