Google gets site-specific

June 12, 2007
by Latitude

This is a breaking story, being broken solely by search-centric journalist John Battelle as I type. No official links yet, but John often gets the news before everyone else. So here’s what’s afoot, in Google’s own words:

In an ongoing effort to provide more transparency to advertisers, Google announced today the availability of a new AdWords report, called a Placement Performance report, which enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.

John summarises:

In short, Google is dealing with what is known as the “blind network problem” – advertisers pour money into AdSense, and they get a sense of how the campaign performed in aggregate, but they have no idea which sites did great, and which sites did poorly, or often, even which sites they ended up on (unless they specified via the relatively new site specific buys on AdSense.)

This new set of reporting addresses this issue, allowing advertisers to determine where their campaigns are doing best, and then they can optimize accordingly. It’s a major step for Google, and it solidifies the company as the player to beat in third party ad networks. Does this have anything to do with the Doubleclick acquisition? Come on, is the Pope Catholic?

From the sounds of it, Google is going to be getting very granular with individual websites and matching their advertisers with them in a more pro-active way. As John concludes of Google’s progression with this announcement: