Google improves tools to track effectiveness of ads

Google Inc, seeking more customers for its marketing services, is unveiling a tool to collect feedback from consumers on the effectiveness of web-advertising campaigns.

Marketers will be able to ask online users questions to measure data such as brand awareness, Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of advertising, said in an interview. While marketers track performance based on which ads are clicked, the survey service aims to better measure whether users might later recall product names or consider purchases after viewing promotions, which can include videos, pictures or graphics.

Google is crafting new tools to help it expand beyond search-based advertising and fend off rivals such as Facebook Inc and Yahoo! Inc. Google got 84 per cent of its revenue from ads in the latest quarter, and is expected to grab 43 per cent of the 2013 US digital-ad market, which is projected to grow 14 per cent to $42.5 billion, according to EMarketer Inc.

"There's a lot more work that we can do here," Wojcicki said in an interview prior to a presentation at the Internet Advertising Bureau meeting today in Phoenix. "We are investing a lot more in our brand advertising business. That's definitely a focus for us."

The new service builds on past efforts, including a feature called Brand Activate, which signals when an ad has been viewed.

The new tool borrows from a marketing research service called "Google Consumer Surveys," which gives people access to premium online content after they complete questionnaires. The new service will be initially available for customers buying video ads on YouTube, Google's video-sharing site.

The ad feature rollout is part of the company's broader push to provide marketers with more metrics on how advertising is performing online, Wojcicki said.

"We're basically in a really dynamic and important time," she said. "Because users are moving digitally so fast, advertisers have to move as fast as users."