Business Opportunities Weblog

July 1, 2008 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

The Wall Street Journal:

Google plans to unveil a new service that measures Internet use, according to advertising executives who have been briefed on it. The tool is intended to help advertisers identify the best places to buy online ads by telling them which Web sites their target audiences visit.

Google’s approach, aimed at bolstering its ad-sales business, could pose a major threat to the Web measurement services that are available now, ad executives say. The two main players in the business — comScore and Nielsen Online — gather data on Internet use largely by tracking what panels of people do online or by conducting surveys, and their results can be inconsistent and incomplete. Google’s new offering will be based mostly on data from Web servers, allowing for a deeper and broader view of Internet use. And unlike the services from comScore and Nielsen, Google’s will be offered to marketers free, according to ad executives.

Billions of marketing dollars a year trade hands based at least in part on Web-audience figures. Advertisers study the data — which can estimate the total number of people that visit a Web site or the average amount of time those people spend on the site or both — to try to determine which sites are popular among particular demographic groups or in certain topic areas, such as technology or health. Publishers also rely on the data to set ad rates.

Separately, Google this week is expected to roll out a new tool aimed at showing how Web surfers respond to online ads. It will compare groups of people who are exposed to an ad with others who haven’t seen it, taking into account such factors as search activity and site visitation.

The services are a logical next step for Google as it moves into other parts of the advertising business, including television and newspapers, where the company has begun selling ad space. Marketers are hungry for research that helps them compare the results of offline and online ads so that they can allocate their marketing budgets more intelligently. Google could be positioned to serve this one-stop-shopping role.

Photo by Google.

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Tags: Google, Internet, Tools