The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Hundreds of thousands of advertisers use PPC to grow their businesses, but display advertising also connects searchers with services that interest them. For an advertiser, display ads are critical to boosting awareness of their service. For the online publishers who create the inventory, display ads help fund investment in online content.

The numerous display formats (video, image, interactive) and the thousands of Web sites that sell display ads create complexity for advertisers trying to buy and manage display inventory. Publishers also lose out – some are left with over 80% of their inventory unsold.

So with the aim of benefiting both the advertisers and publishers, Google recently announced that it will expand its content syndication to DoubleClick publishers via the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

What is The DoubleClick Ad Exchange?
The DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell advertising space. By creating an open market the Ad Exchange enables ad space to be allocated more efficiently across the Web.

Google cited 3 main objectives for the expansion to DoubleClick publishers:

1.    Simplify the system for buying and selling display ads
2.    Deliver improved performance and provide its advertisers with measurable results
3.    Expand reach for all advertisers and publishers to participate

DoubleClick states that the publishers and the ad networks and agency networks will benefit from this change. Ad networks and agency networks will have access to a new API which enables them to integrate their own functionality and systems when working with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

The sharing of these assets should be beneficial to both advertisers and publishers alike in the foreseeable future. On the publishing side, publishers can benefit by auctioning remnant inventory to Google’s large base of hundreds of thousands of online advertisers in a slumping economy to help maximize their site’s ad revenue.

On the advertiser side, advertisers can potentially reach more premium Web sites without the hassle of going through offline contracts, legal negotiations, minimum purchases and lengthy commitments. Advertisers can, for all practical purposes, discontinue buying display ads with the click of a mouse.

While Google is playing catch-up to its rival Yahoo and Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange in terms of selling display advertising, it is interesting to note that the average advertiser still cannot access most of Right Media’s assets though their Yahoo search Marketing Account. Hopefully the average AdWords advertiser will have the same potential inventory selection and basic targeting capabilities as the larger ad networks that work with DoubleClick.
 
Andrew Bernero, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.