So This Is What DoubleClick Was For: Google Introduces Standard Functionality

I just love the days when Google makes some important announcement (or not important -it rarely matters), especially when such an announcement is about their advertising solutions. The blogosphere will be abuzz this only topic for a whole day and then will continue talking about it for a week or so until all the details are discussed properly.

Today’s big news is enhancement of Google’s content network - the network that combines all the publishers participating in Google AdSense program. The enhancements announced today are supposed to become available in the next few months and include frequency capping and reporting, improved ads quality, and view-through conversions.

For an end user these features mean that we are promised not to see the same ads again and again due to advertiser control over the ads that are shown and how many times they are shown. For advertisers the announcement means they will be able to better control ads by understanding how many people watched each ad and the percentage of the users who actually clicked through to the advertised site.

This new functionality is enabled by using the DoubleClick ad-serving cookie throughout the entire publisher network (without publishers actually having to make any changes themselves). This time Google seems to think about privacy concerns in advance - a user can easily opt out of the cookie for all the websites in the content network.

In general Google has not introduced anything extraordinary - the new enhancements are simply supposed to bring Google AdSense to the level of functionality where the smaller ad networks operate already. It’s just that Google as a monopolist never really needed to offer its users a first-class service in advertising. It has always seemed to me that Google’s major goal was to keep everything dead-simple and easily accessible for every publisher, even the smallest one without any understanding of how online advertising works.

But it looks like Google has finally decided that it was time to improve some things not to keep everything at the very basic level - after all, Google can afford to offer the best possible service in every field and it is quite strange to see Google’s advertising solutions lagging behind everything else.

Unfortunately looking for the highest value for users and advertisers, Google may very well damage the publishers. First of all, I think every publisher is aware that the relevant links for our websites are not unlimited - and this is exactly why users have to see the same ads again and again, simply because there are no other relevant ads in the network for this particular publisher. And what happens if frequency capping is in place? Advertiser chooses not to show a link to every single user, say, more than 10 times. That leaves the publisher with those public service ads for a great number of impressions - and without any hopes that when a user sees this link for 100^th time he will finally decides to click - at least to commemorate the moment.

What’s more, now that advertisers will know where exactly their ads work better, they will certainly leave no or almost no placements for smaller publishers that generate a handful of impressions and even smaller number of clicks.

I am sure that this is a wise move for the advertising network and of course Google is not the network that may be afraid of losing some of its publishers because of unfavorable decisions. So anyway this is the move we should have expected - and if someone is unhappy about it, I don’t think Google will ever notice.