Google to Offer a Tool

Tag : power measuring tool

But with Google already controlling a growing swath of advertisingreal estate both online and off, some ad executives are leery aboutplacing even more power in the company's hands. "For an advertiser,the last thing you want to do is to have your adviser be the sameperson you are spending your money with," says Sarah Fay, chiefexecutive of Aegis North America, the media-buying giant owned byAegis Group of the U.K.
ComScore said it wouldn't comment before Google makes an officialannouncement. Nielsen Online also declined to comment.
Billions of marketing dollars a year trade hands based at least inpart on Web-audience figures. Advertisers study the data -- whichcan estimate the total number of people that visit a Web site orthe average amount of time those people spend on the site or both-- to try to determine which sites are popular among particulardemographic groups or in certain topic areas, such as technology orhealth. Publishers also rely on the data to set ad rates.
Google's new tool could bring more efficiency to the process ofbuying online ads, ad executives say. Google already has one of thedominant systems for online ad-serving, which helps Web publishersmanage their advertising sales and serve up ads each time aconsumer opens one of their Web pages. The Web-audience data couldbe combined with the ad-serving system, so that advertisers wouldbe able to find out whether they would reach the right audiencebefore they committed to placing an ad. Existing ad-serving systemsdon't currently provide detailed Web-audience data about the siteswhere they place ads. By giving away the new tool, Google couldpresumably attract more ad business.
Separately, Google this week is expected to roll out a new toolaimed at showing how Web surfers respond to online ads. It willcompare groups of people who are exposed to an ad with others whohaven't seen it, taking into account such factors as searchactivity and site visitation.
The services are a logical next step for Google as it moves intoother parts of the advertising business, including television andnewspapers, where the company has begun selling ad space. Marketersare hungry for research that helps them compare the results ofoffline and online ads so that they can allocate their marketingbudgets more intelligently. Google could be positioned to servethis one-stop-shopping role.
Some ad executives say they are concerned that Google could use thedata it compiles about their campaigns to make a business pitch toa competitor. They imagine a scenario in which the biggest onlineadvertiser in a category is running its campaign through Google'sad-serving systems. Not only would Google be helping that marketerdeliver ads to particular Web sites; it would also be capturingdata about which Web sites and types of ads work best. Advertisingexecutives fear that Google could then resell that sameintelligence to competitors. (Any data that marketers put intoGoogle's ad systems will remain confidential, a Google spokesmansays.)
For all the cutting-edge technology on the Web, the systems used tomeasure Internet use are mostly based on traditional models. BothcomScore and Nielsen rely on panels of people who agree to let thecompanies track their online movements, from the Web sites theyvisit to the purchases they make. ComScore and Nielsen then takethese data and extrapolate from them to make statements about thebroader population of Internet users. In some cases, Nielsenbenchmarks its findings against a Web site's computer-server logs.
With its new service, Google, like comScore and Nielsen, will offermarketers demographic details about potential customers, such asage, gender and income. Google's new tool, which will also rely onsome data gleaned from panels of human users and other sources, issimilar to one developed by New York-based start-up Quantcast,which has been gaining popularity among media buyers. But becauseof its size, Google has the potential to shake up theWeb-measurement business.
"This could disrupt some of the current ways that people areworking," says Alan Schanzer, managing partner of MEC InteractionNorth America, part of WPP Group's media-buying and planning unitMediaedge:cia.
Server-based data come with challenges of their own. Measurementsare generally based on "cookies," or small pieces of tracking data,on Web surfers' computer hard drives. Because consumers sometimesdelete cookies and then get new ones when they return to a site,server-based systems often overcount audiences. Also, a computerserver can have a hard time distinguishing whether a site's visitoris a real person or a technology that visits Web sites for otherpurposes. In addition, server-based systems can track only thoseWeb sites with which they have struck agreements to place cookies.