"Google Working on Better Ways to Measure Online Ad Impact"

Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of
display advertising 

Still the king of search ads, with no end in sight, Google has for years tried to diversify into display ads, the pictorial banners that support most Web sites. Despite those efforts, Facebook has zoomed into the lead in display ads. But with the rapid growth of Google’s own display ads on partner sites, its YouTube service, and Android phones has some forecasters predicting the search giant will capture the lead next year.

Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of display advertising, shed some light on what’s coming next in display for Google at Federal Media Publishing’s Signal SF conference this morning in San Francisco. Here are the highlights of his talk with Federated Media Founder and Executive Chairman John Battelle, author of The Search who also writes the seminal Searchblog:

Q: What about the controversy about Google going around the privacy protections of the Safari browser to put a cookie on people’s machines?

Mohan: We announced a few months ago we’d be placing +1 buttons on ads on our display

network to people who are signed into Google and opted into advertising. So we chose to use a known workaround in Safari to make a temporary connection to do this personalization. Because of that, it also opened the door for our general third-party ad serving technology, the DoubleClick cookie, to be placed. That was an unintended consequence. Really, the intent was to honor our users’ intention to opt in to this kind of personalization.

Q: Who’s right, the choices people make for the browser or choices they make for the services on it?

Mohan: We tried to honor what our users wanted in the signup process.

Q: Google’s brand has taken a bit of a bruising, a lot of it from taking a very focused attempt to make Google+ work and integrate it with everything. Why?

Mohan: Our focus is on our users. We know that we can make our products a lot better when we know something about our users. For example, if they’re searching for travel a couple of months out and we can see conflicts from what’s on their calendar, we can surface that. Our efforts to personalize our services based on that type of information is not limited to Google+. It’s across all of these services, because we know that’s what makes our products dramatically better for users.

Q: I would like it if I could see Instagram photos when I’m on Google. Or Facebook. But it seems the only way we can do that now is if you do a deal with Facebook. Can we flip that model to give control to users?

Mohan: All the parties involved need to ascribe to that. Just Google doing that won’t solve the problem.

Q: You’re pretty big, though, wouldn’t it help?

Mohan: [Same answer.]

Q: It feels like Google is being put into a walled garden.

Mohan: I wouldn’t put it that way. Google from its earliest days has been about the open Web. It’s a core tenet.

Q: I stumble on that when I see that in search results, we see only Google+ as social results.

Mohan: We are not the only party in those relationships. I’ll leave it at that.

Q: You’ve got quite a stack [of ad technologies]. Are there still holes in your offerings?

Mohan: The progress has been dramatic. Real-time bidding didn’t even exist a few years ago. As for big unsolved problems: Measurement. But how do we get from $25 billion to $50 billion in online ads to $300 billion to $400 billion? Measuring the efficacy of digital marketing. This is a big area of focus in 2o12 and subsequent years.

Q: Will preroll always be the main ads for YouTube? It feels very unGoogley.

Mohan: I think we can get past that. Every advertiser would say they don’t want an interruptive experience that doesn’t bring some value or emotional experience for users. TrueView allows users to skip ads. Advertisers are willing to pay dramatically more for views that are real (not skipped).

Q: Can clicks apply as a signal of intent to display advertising as well as search?

Mohan: Yes. The click is one aspect. There are other signals that tell us about the usefulness of ads. There’s a whole slew of other signals you can use because they’re on this bigger canvas, including direct signals from our users.

Q (from the audience now): What is the atomic unit of Google display ads?

Mohan: It depends on the context of the user. On YouTube, the atomic unit is something that incorporates video. Across the Web on our display network, the challenge is the hardest. Every single Web site is different.

Q: When are you going to have ads running in Google+?

Mohan: Can’t say.

Q (audience): Does Google have a different methodology for measurement than others out there?

Mohan: We think there are some unique capabilities that we can bring to the market. Not to replace others out there in the market, but to supplement them to make them dramatically more actionable.

Q (audience): There are so many ways to advertise with Google that it can get confusing.

Mohan: I do hear that. We’d like to get better about that. We’d like to give more systematic recommendations across channels. We are working very hard at that. It’s very related to the measurement.