Posted By
Wesley Picotte on 10/30/2009
Recently, Google announced the launch of Google
Campaign Insights, a new tool that enables advertisers to gauge the impact
that banner campaigns have on paid search. This is certainly not a new
capability (this influence was first reported about six years ago), but it's a
good addition to the solid arsenal of measurement and analysis tools Google
already offers. Of course, Campaign Insights is limited to Google
Content Network advertisers only, and for the time being, it's available
only to "advertisers or agencies that run wide-scale display ad campaigns.”
According to the agency blog post on the new tool, "...Google Campaign
Insights is available for larger display ad campaigns across the Google Content
Network in the US and UK. Over time, we hope to roll it out more widely to
assist even more advertisers and agencies in different parts of the
world."
Several top-tier ad servers provide the ability to measure cross-channel
influence, so Google has hardly found a new corner to dominate. However, it is
doing something unique compared to other offerings, which is to
programmatically include a control group when the tool is applied. This approach
will provide a very good basis for comparison between behavior for searchers
who have been exposed to an advertiser's banners against searchers who
definitively have not. In other words, marketers employing this tool will have
statistically sound data sets demonstrating the value of their banner
advertising investments.
There's a huge value to understanding the influence of campaigns delivered to
premium publishers that aren't within Google's content network, but for this,
you would need a stand-alone ad server solution (or an agency that can provide
this technology). While there are pros and cons to advertising on Google’s
content network (White Horse has run
multiple campaigns on it), I'm a fan of the approach Google has modeled here.
This new tool, once broadly available, will provide marketers of all shapes and
sizes validation that their banner investment is working just as they've long
suspected—as a catalyst for greater search frequency and response.
Tags: digital advertising, paid search, Media Planning & Buying, Display Advertising
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