Google Debuts New Measurement Solution for Brand Advertising

Google has stepped up its display game with a new solution to measure the effectiveness of brand advertising. It’s called Campaign Insights – and beginning today it will be offered to larger advertisers in the U.S. and U.K.  Eventually it will be available free of charge to all of Google’s display advertisers.

The system, which has been in beta test for the past year, uses data from a marketer’s server logs to determine who was delivered an ad and at what time. Google compares this data to Web searches and site visits for the brand and relates it to a similar group of people with no exposure to the ad.

To siphon out the influence of other media campaigns, Google compares the data of the groups’ behavior prior to the campaign start date. Thus, a brand’s display campaign can be attributed to the resulting difference.

Google aims to solve two key challenges with the new system:

1. For brand display campaigns, the click doesn’t tell the whole story as it doesn’t measure the value of the view on driving brand awareness. 360i CEO Bryan Wiener, who spoke to Ad Age this morning, said: “The consensus is the click is the wrong metric in display, but there’s a void in coming up with the right measure.”
2. Attribution is becoming critical as marketers look to find the right media mix online. Understanding what drives search queries and the path leading up to a conversion is key.

Search is clearly the bigger market – eMarketer anticipates $12 billion to be spent on search in 2009, vs. $4.7 billion on display – yet Google is hoping to lure more ad dollars into the latter by providing a more sophisticated ROI metric that will more precisely track campaign success. 360i is working with Google to discuss how this can best be deployed for marketers.