I’ve been getting a few requests to advertise on halloween-australia.com, as halloween draws closer.
So far it’s had a simple AdSense block on it, for contextual advertising through AdWords, that I’d setup at the beginning of the site, years ago.

I’ve seen mentions of Ad Planner, Ad Manager, DoubleClick and Google Affiliate, but hadn’t looked into it. I did this weekend – and there went the weekend. (Apart from a nice BBQ at Russells on Sat night).

Talk about confusing. It was worse because I had AdSense setup using an old Yahoo email address, Analytics using a Gmail address, and AdWords yet another Gmail address.
The first thing Google kept nagging me to do, was link AdSense and Analytics. Eventually, after making the Yahoo account administrator on the Gmail Analytics accounts, it said they were linked….

Then to signup to Google DoubleClick for Publishers (Small Business), which is abbreviated everywhere as DFP SB.
The signup form rejected my multiple websites, even though it said I could list them comma-separated, so at first I set it up just for halloween-australia.com.
And no where on earth could I find out where to add the extra sites later. That’s definitely a forum job.
Wallowing through the forums, there was finally a link to the how to start guide: http://www.google.com/support/dfp_sb/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=27854

First you add your ad units, then you group them into placements, then you tag them, and stick the code on your site. The code consists of a header, and then separate blocks for each ad unit.

You have to take care to turn on the default AdSense bidding, to optimise earnings, and if no ad orders are available.
I went back to AdSense and updated each of the channels, to make them more public and targatable to AdWords advertisers.
Then back to DFP SB to check everything was ok.

Google still kept mentioning Ad Planner, so I signed up for that as well.
Again, it preferred my Yahoo address for site verification, so I had to add Yahoo to my Webmaster Tools list of sites. At least Google finally lets you add extra owners to site verification.

So in theory, halloween-australia can now be found through DoubleClick, Ad Planner and AdWords.

I’ll wait and see. It really wasn’t a smooth process.