New Google Ads Take A Page (Or Two) From Facebook

Just as Google showed how to do search advertising right, Facebook is doing the same for display and mobile ads. And this time, even Google is having to follow the leader.

On Monday, Google will introduce two new kinds of ads at the annual Advertising Week in New York that clearly reflect Facebook's success with targeting ads to the likeliest prospects, even as the search giant tries to take a step beyond the social network.

For one, Google will give brand advertisers a way to target their own customers with ads across all of the search giant's big properties, including search, YouTube, and Gmail. Specifically, the new product, called Customer Match, will give advertisers the ability to upload a list of email addresses of their customers that can then be matched with logged-in Google users--similar to Facebook's Custom Audiences.

Advertisers also will be able to use a Similar Audiences product to target others on YouTube and Gmail to reach people likely to be interested in the same products and services. That's similar to Facebook's Lookalike Audiences. Here's how it will work, according to an upcoming blog post by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google's senior vice-president for ads and commerce, who will present the news Monday afternoon:

Let's say you’re a travel brand. You can now reach people who have joined your rewards program as
they plan their next trip. For example, when these rewards members search for “non-stop flights to
new york” on Google.com, you can show relevant ads at the top of their search results on any device
right when they’re looking to fly to New York. And when those members are watching their favorite

videos on YouTube or catching up on Gmail, you can show ads that inspire them to plan their next
trip.

Using Customer Match, you can also generate Similar Audiences to reach new customers on
YouTube and Gmail who are likely to be interested in your products and services. For example, you
can drive awareness on YouTube for new non-stop flights by showing TrueView ads to prospective
customers who have similar interests and characteristics to your rewards members.

Apart from addressing Facebook's success at this kind of targeting, Google also aims to bring the buying intent of search--really its key attribute versus other kinds of advertising--to video and display ads. Advertisers say they like Facebook ads as much as anything because of this ability to reach both their existing customers and others very much like them, even on other sites and apps than Facebook.

Google also will introduce a new kind of ad that it announced at its I/O conference for developers in May. App install ads that prompt people to download and install a mobile app have become a cash cow for Facebook, which has as much as half the $6 billion market for these ads. Google also offers the ads, but on Monday, it will allow all developers and advertisers to run a new type of app install ad campaign through its AdWords ad system that can reach people across all of Google's major ad properties: search, YouTube, the Google Display Network of more than 2 million partner websites such as the New York Times', and the Google Play app store. From the blog post:

Let’s say you’ve built an adventure game. With Universal App Campaigns, you have unparalleled
reach: you can drive installs on YouTube, the platform with 1B+ users who watch hundreds of
millions of hours of content everyday. Your ads can also reach specific audiences across 650K
apps and 2M+ websites in the GDN. And importantly, Universal App Campaigns tap into intent-rich
searches like “adventure games” and “puzzle games” that are happening throughout the day on
Google Search and Google Play so your app can be seen when people are looking to download
something new.

Advertisers can plug in how much they're willing to pay for each installation and Google can pull in app images and descriptions from Google Play to create an ad automatically, try out variations to determine the best ads, and then target them to each property.

Google hopes such moves can help it gain ground against Facebook in display and video ads. According to eMarketer, Facebook is now way ahead of Google in display ad revenues, at an expected $6.8 billion this year to Google's $3.5 billion. Together, they hold the lion's share of display revenues.

Meanwhile, Facebook isn't standing still. On Sunday, it announced a series of new ad products, including a new method of measuring video ads that can be compared more directly to television ads, called Total Rating Point. It also announced an improved method for measuring brand awareness and a way for brand advertisers such as those that spend most of their budgets on TV to measure mobile ad campaign effectiveness via user polls.