Video Ads Mark Shift in Google

Google today introduced click-to-play video ads in the U.S., Canada,
and Japan and, in the process, shook up its business model and identity.

An analyst applauded the new offering for its brand-making
capability, but warned that Google will have to embrace more portal-like user measurements for it to succeed.

And, indeed, Google will now measure how long users interact with the
video ads.

In an e-mail to internetnews.com, Google said the video ads
will run on the AdWords auction model and can be placed on specific
sites or on sites that contain certain contextual keywords. The
videos will last up to two minutes.

Google said advertisers will be charged per click or per impression.

Charging per “impression” marks a shift for Google because
that represents how long users interact with the video
ads.

Time users spend on a page is a metric called “engagement,” and it has
long been prized by portals such as Yahoo and ignored by Google.

“We want to be a switchboard,” Google Finance product manager Katie
Stanton told internetnews.com when her product launched earlier this year.

“What we’ve done is crawled and extracted data from the Web and linked
off to those sites to send users to a place that goes really deep,”
Stanton said. “We actually don’t track how long a user stays on
our site.”

But now, by charging per impression, Google has to measure how long
users spend on at least one part of Google’s network.

And it is about time, Forrester Research Analyst Shar VanBoskirk told internetnews.com.

Google owes as much to their advertisers, she said.

“The challenge for any advertiser is trying to figure out how much
they’re getting out of the investment they’re putting in,” she said.

Traditionally, Google has done that for its advertising customers by
charging them per click.

“But in this case,” VanBoskirk said. “It may not be a click that’s
actually generating the value to the advertiser. ”

That’s because video advertising is most useful for brand advertising.

An ad aimed at shaping a consumer’s sense of a brand is not
necessarily a failed advertisement if that consumer does not
click through it to arrive on the advertiser’s site.

“It may be about ‘Do you feel differently about the brand now, is there
some sort of attitude adjustment, some sort of affinity you now feel
toward the brand?'” VanBoskirk said.

Those changes are what brand advertisers pay for, but they are hard
to measure.

Online media companies, or portals such as Yahoo, have long measured
the amount of time users spend on their sites and then used that data
to sell themselves to advertisers.

By charging per impression, Google will do the same.

The question now will be whether Google is tempted to break out of
its mold and create content to keep users on
their pages longer. The incentive is there.

The question is not whether Google is a portal, VanBoskirk said.

“I don’t know if they say they’re trying not to be a portal. But I certainly think they are and I certainly think they should be if that’s not the direction they’re going.”