“Google plans to reveal a comScore and Nielsen killer tomorrow, reported the Wall Street Journal.”
San Francisco — Measuring the Internet usage tool may be the next free thing from Google, a service that augurs competition with companies that charge a hefty premium for such information.
Internet search leader Google Inc. is all set to offer advertisers a free service that measures Internet usage, which helps them identify the best spots on the web to buy ads that will reach its target audience, a company spokesman said on Monday, posing a challenge to existing Web measurement firms.
Google’s overture is aimed at strengthening its ad-sales business, could pose a major threat to the Web measurement services that are available now, ad executives say. The new measurement tools, which will be provided to advertisers and their agencies for free, will compete with the likes of services offered by established leaders Nielsen and ComScore, based on the notion that the more data ad customers have about their audiences, the more they are likely to spend.
The spokesman said audience measurement attributes are the product of Google’s efforts to provide better media planning tools. He declined to give further details on the plans, which will be announced in a company blog post on Tuesday.
While those services establish their assessments on selective surveys or customer panels, Google’s results would be based on data collected from Web servers, providing a deeper and broader picture of Internet behavior, the newspaper reported.
This would make clear why Google’s partner, Publicis Group, reacted to news of Google’s ad deal with Yahoo with joy rather than apprehension. By giving away the new tool, Google could attract more advertising business.
But with Google already commanding an increasing chunk of advertising real estate both online and off, some ad executives are leery about placing even more power in the company’s hands. “For an advertiser, the last thing you want to do is to have your adviser be the same person you are spending your money with,” says Sarah Fay, chief executive of Aegis North America, the media-buying giant owned by Aegis Group of the U.K.
The news comes as Google’s announcement last week that Google Trends had launched a new service that allows users to type in specific domains and compares basic traffic information about any .com site by means of nothing more than natural user searches. Also incorporated are every day traffic figures in users (sent from Google search), where in the world the users are coming from, and any associated sites that were either searched for or visited in that same session.
ComScore shares fell $1.69, or 6.1 percent, to $26 in extended trading immediately following news of Google’s planned media measurement service. Nielsen Media is a unit of Nielsen Co, which is owned by a collection of top private equity firms.
These Web statistics firms have origins in conventional media or retail audience tracking technologies. However, in recent times their statistical approaches have faced dissatisfaction among advertisers and publishers over how complete their data is. By contrast, Google’s audience measurement tool would come with a broader set of data collected directly from Web servers.
To offer a factual assessment proposition, Google has to position such a service as being superior to what advertisers receive from rival services today. Considering Google’s technical acumen, if such an announcement comes on Tuesday, competitors could be in for an unpleasant time.
ComScore said it would not comment before Google makes an official announcement. Nielsen Online also declined to comment.