Google, Redefining the One-Stop Shop

In a Wall Street Journal article, Emily Steel reports that Google is set to release a new tool which measures Internet use. Intended to help advertisers identify the best places to buy online ads, the products most valuable asset might be its cost.

Unlike other services that gather data on internet use largely by tracking the online activity of different panels of people, such as comScore and Nielsen, Google will be offering its new advertising tool to marketers for free.

An excerpt from the article:

"Google's new tool could bring more efficiency to the process of buying online ads, ad executives say. Google already has one of the dominant systems for online ad-serving, which helps Web publishers manage their advertising sales and serve up ads each time a consumer opens one of their Web pages. The Web-audience data could be combined with the ad-serving system, so that advertisers would be able to find out whether they would reach the right audience before they committed to placing an ad. Existing ad-serving systems don't currently provide detailed Web-audience data about the sites where they place ads. By giving away the new tool, Google could presumably attract more ad business."

In addition, Google is expected to produce another tool which will show how web users respond to online ads. By comparing groups of people exposed to an ad with others who haven't been exposed, Google is able to account for such factors as search activity and site visitation. These tools combine to offer amazing opportunities for marketers on all levels as access to such a tool could save billions in the advertising world.

One-stop shops generally rely on more affordable prices to compensate for a lower quality package of services. However, the new Google marketing service will be both the most affordable and advanced technology on the market - making Google the one-stop shop to end all one-stop shops.