14 DAY TRIAL // Google is getting involved in any market it can and its product range is always expanding. But at the end of the day it makes its money from advertising, mostly the search ads it serves in the results pages. The company has been trying to move into display ads but so far it hasn't been too successful. It's not giving up though and it's now ready to offer a tool to advertisers to help them better measure the impact of their display ad campaigns, something that proved difficult in the past.
Dubbed Campaign Insights, the technology has been in the works for quite some time and has been tested with large advertising partners like PayPal and Simplexity, as AdAge reports. It will eventually roll out the tool to all advertisers. The tool could prove very important to advertisers and Google alike and, along with some other developments, it may eventually revolutionize the display ad market. Right now display ads are more of a leap of faith. The only real measurable metric, click-through rates, despite being largely used, is obsolete and inefficient as studies have shown that the vast majority of users don't click on ads.
Campaign Insights pulls data from several sources to try to gauge the impact of display ads on the users. Google has access to the advertiser's log data to determine which users were shown what ads. It then determines what those users searched for on Google and what sites they visited based on the data gathered from the Google Toolbar installs. After that, it tries to see if there is a connection between the ads and the searches and compares it with a control group made up of users who haven't seen the ads. Then it uses the difference to determine the success of the ad campaign.
The hope is that this will give advertisers more confidence to invest in display ad campaigns as they will be able to get some data on their effectiveness, which is especially useful in large campaigns spread across several mediums. "This should help advertisers get the balance between search and display right because they will have a better understanding of any lift that results from their display campaigns," Brad Bender, an advertising product director at Google, told AdAge.