Google knows you. It knows what type of car you drive from that time, last year, when you looked up the where you could find a cheap set of tires. It knows that you like Mexican food from all the times you’ve looked on Google Maps. And Google knows how to leverage this type of information with services like Google AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange but now it’s moving into what it’s calling “the next generation of ad serving” – a simplified, streamlined ad server.
While Google currently has the upper hand in the battle, it’s starting to look more and more like Google and Facebook are about to duke it out in the advertising arena. And who will they be battling over? The little guy.
Google’s latest move in the advertising sphere replaces DoubleClick DART and Google Ad Manager with DoubleClick for Publishers, an ad management system meant to simplify the more complex aspects of managing ad space.
According to an article on PaidContent, this latest move by Google “involves the promise of greater simplicity as it aims for smaller publishers”. DoubleClick for Publishers offers a simple, free version of DFP for small businesses and another (not free) for larger websites – likely customers of DoubleClick DART.
The new service offers a redesigned interface, more detailed reporting, algorithms to automatically improve ad performance and a public API to allow for third-party apps to use the DFP system.
DFP will allow its users to perform a number of functions, from running different ads at different times, according to when they best perform, to mixing and matching different priced ads to various page locations.
We think that the increased focus on small businesses is a growing trend in online advertising, as we just saw with Facebook announcing last week that it would begin accepting PayPal for advertising. It seems that many of these big companies are realizing that they may be missing out on innumerable revenue streams from small businesses by making the task of advertising daunting and complicated. A dollar is a dollar, after all, and increasing accessibility while reducing confusion should only increase the number of dollars coming in.
