Not too long ago, Google made news when it lost the top spot among The World’s Most Valuable Brands.
Of course, that was just the evaluation of one consulting company – Interbrand, to be exact – and it’s not like there’s any shame in falling a step behind equally ambitious tech giant Apple, Inc.
Much like its close competitor and Silicon Valley area neighbor Apple, Google is forever seeking new avenues to expand its empire.
Sometimes, that means rolling out its lightning-fast high-speed internet service provider (known as Google Fiber) in select American markets. Other times, that means purchasing other companies and absorbing them into its everyday operations.
Amongst that latter group lies a recent purchase of Austin, Texas-based online ad attribution firm Adometry.
Such an acquisition – for an undisclosed amount, nonetheless – may not generate the same buzz as, say, buying a bunch of military-ready robots and giant cats. But it was first reported in the venerable Wall Street Journal – or on its CMO Today blog, at least.
And it could potentially mean quite a bit for online advertisers. And pretty much right away, too.
By acquiring Adometry, Google should be able to help its advertisers get a clearer and stronger sense of just how their online ad campaigns work as a cohesive unit. As specialists in online ad attribution, Adometry has mastered the science of crediting various online ads for influencing an individual to take action – from clicking on an ad to actually, actively purchasing something online (also known in some circles as e-commerce).
On “The Science of Adometry” portion of their site, Adometry proclaims the following:
“Many marketing attribution models still assign full credit to the last-click, or use predetermined or custom weights to assign credit to every touch point. In the end, all simple attribution models are arbitrary, and can never accurately describe a complicated problem such as cross-channel marketing.”
In contrast, Adometry Attribute uses a “data-driven,” probabilistic approach to determine what should receive the credit. Attribute takes into account any and all available data streams – unifying silos of data – and analyzes all data instead of sample sets, yielding a highly accurate and insightful model for marketers to judge their marketing efforts.
Attribute is also integrated with numerous data providers, pulling first and third party data for increased accuracy, scalable marketing analytics and reporting depth that allows for truly actionable insights to be uncovered.”
In their official announcement of their absorption by Google via their web site, Adometry CEO Paul Pellman blogged that Adometry is “excited to begin working with our new colleagues at Google, including the Google Analytics Premium team, to offer great attribution solutions for both our customers and theirs.” Pellman added that Google is “a company that shares our core values. Not only do they focus on innovation and solving big problems, but also like Adometry, they seek to provide brands and their agency partners with the analytics and insights to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns.”
For their part, Google Analytics authored a blog post on their Google+ page that explained Adometry “will build on the momentum of our existing measurement and analytics offerings, which include Google Analytics Premium as well as other products. Available globally, Google Analytics Premium and its hundreds of customers, will now have an additional set of tools to accomplish their business and marketing goals.”
The Google Analytics blog post added that “Attribution solutions, like Adometry’s, help businesses better understand the influence that different marketing tools — digital, offline, email, and more — have along their customers’ paths to purchase (https://goo.gl/tXTliw). This heightened understanding, in turn, enables businesses to measure marketing impact, allocate their resources more wisely, and provide people with ads and messages that they’re likely to care about.”
Google has claimed that Adometry will continue to operate independently, at least in the near future.
Google can certainly use the lift Adometry is sure to provide – not only in functionality and flexibility, but in reputation repair as well. For the past several years, many online publishers have complained that Google search ads get far too much credit. Among companies that sell online ads, the common complaint seems to be that Google ads perform well only because people encounter them after searching for something specific. In other words, a consumer may have encountered a lot of other ads prior to searching for, say, “cartoon umbrella” – and then clicking on an online ad for Disney.
The extensive report on the Wall Street Journal blog also mentioned that Adometry has strong roots in online ad fraud prevention – even having been acquired by online ad fraud detection firm Click Forensics (now the name of an Adometry service/product) in 2011. As the blog post pointed out, Google has made a point lately in being a leader when it comes to sniffing and snuffing out bogus traffic, fake sites and bots.
What do YOU think about this merger between Google and Adometry? Have you had any experience – good, bad, indifferent or otherwise – with Adometry in the past? Do you believe this merger will help Google’s online advertisers achieve “great attribution solutions” right out of the gate?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below this blog post. We’d love to hear from YOU on this hot topic.
