Yup, it’s Google. Once again!
On Wednesday, a friend of mine asked me if i know Google Ad Manager is open for beta testing.
At that point, i don’t even know what Google Ad Manager is.
Well as it turns out, Google made a very strategic and scary move : If offers Ad Serving Technology for free.
Up until this point, we used to pay companies like DoubleClick, Atlas etc… to do the job.
(Learn more about Ad serving)
However, it’s time that Google decides to offer Ad Manager, which can do the following:
- Inventory management
- Yield optimization
- Ad targeting
- Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking
- Creatives and rich media management
- Reporting
- User interface navigation
- Account administration
Well it’s all the basic stuff about ad serving. Yet it makes me feel really scared.
With this free platform, if successful, Google will have control over a very large piece of the whole internet.
Jeff Jarvis from Buzz Machine wrote : “Google Ad Manager is one critical piece in creating the open network of networks where any site can take any ad and any marketer can advertise on any site.“
From the New York Times: “Ad Manager is flexible enough to let publishers sell their own advertising, Google said. For ad space they can’t sell, publishers can opt to use Google’s AdSense system to fill unsold slots.”
And yet in the process of offering a free Ad serving Platform, Google has access to
- conversion information
- user’s behavior across multiple sites: conversion data
- post impression data
- post click data
- what type of rich media advertisers most often use
- how the performance of each media type
- how much publishers are making exactly (through Adsense and Ad Manager)
- how much advertisers are paying Google through Adwords (is there a gap that it needs to fill?)
- etc…
Google holds tight to these information for itself at the moment, which means there will be no behavorial targeting available, according to Jeff Jarvis.
And with more small advertisers start to use Conversion Optimizer, CPA system in Adwords, Google Ad Manager, Google will basically know how much advertisers are willing to pay to put an ad, how much publishers are willing to sell, what type of conversion is likely to occur across multiple sites (Clicks, sign ups, sales etc…), how people use the internet etc…
There’s little doubt that the Search Engine game is over in my humble opinion. And now, Google is aggressively taking larger piece of Display Ads (offering free platform for both Advertisers, Publishers), it will be soon when Google becomes the nerve center of digital marketing (DoubleClick’s slogan)
The end is near…