Dive Brief:
- Google already offers cross-platform conversion tracking -- someone seeing an ad on one device and making a purchase on another -- for its AdWords ads. It has now added DoubleClick ads served on third-party sites to the conversion tracking mix.
- The move provides the Internet search giant another layer to cross-platform tracking as compared to Facebook’s multi-platform ad tracking product.
- Google is also expanding its overall ad offering by including sponsored content, also known as native advertising, to the types of ads it serves and tracks.
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Dive Insight:
Google’s latest online ad offering is measuring exposure and conversion tracking for DoubleClick banner ads served on third-party websites across multiple platforms. An example of this would be if someone views an ad on a mobile platform and later makes a purchase on a desktop platform. The tech titan had previously offered this ability for its own AdWord ads served across multiple platforms. Multi-platform ad tracking ad on Google’s own sites matched Facebook’s ad tracking capabilities; Google’s new tracking third-party site tracking ability is measurement only, meaning marketers can’t target ads across platforms.
Google is also announcing a new ad product serving native advertising, which is content sponsored by advertisers, to provide those advertisers both a delivery method to get that content into editorial feeds, and also a way to track the performance of native ads.
About the new cross-platform tracking Neal Mohan, vice president of video and display advertising at Google, told Ad Age, "It's really about stitching together that full consumer journey, if you will. But ultimately the end event is some sort of conversion activity, whether it's a sale or a download or what have you."
And Mohan told the Wall Street Journal regarding Google's native ads offering, “We’ve seen programmatic and native become these two rocket ships of growth for our customers, and we want to make it seamless for them to execute both types of campaigns."
