Adsense copies Bidvertiser!

Google AdSense recently announced that AdSense users will be able to change the colour and border format of their ads from within their Adsense accounts ; (from the Google blog)

This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you'd like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account --you'll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300x250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks. Fancy! We hope that this new feature will help you save time and will simplify the process of optimizing your ad units.

This sounds like the way Bidvertiser works. In Bidvertiser you design the ads using a template within the account and then paste the code to your site. When you make changes within the template in the account these are immediately reflected in the ad display on any site using that template. This certainly makes it easier to tweak ad settings and it is good to see that Google is finally catching up with this approach.

On a less positive note these announcements do sometimes sound a bit like fiddling while Rome is burning given the continual anxiety that many AdSense users have about invalid click activity. This is really the area that Google should be putting its efforts into sorting