Google has overhauled the DoubleClick ad exchange it acquired last year, as it looks to extend its text-advertising dominance to the market for graphical, display ads.
The search giant acquired DoubleClick for more than $3 billion in March 2008, in hopes of denting the display ads market dominated by Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL.
The search giant has announced that for the first time it will combine the DoubleClick exchange with its own advertising system and technology.
“We want to make display advertising as accessible and open as possible, like search advertising is today,” says Neil Mohan, vice president of product management at Google.
Mohan claims the new version of the DoubleClick exchange features tools that allow brand advertisers to more precisely target the audiences their ads are shown to and monitor the results.
Google will also link the DoubleClick exchange to its own advertising auction systems – AdWords and AdSense – significantly expanding the number of marketers and publishers that can use the exchange.
According to Google, more than 40% of online ad inventory often goes unsold because publishers don’t have an efficient way to sell the slots.
Ad exchanges play an increasingly important role in the Internet ad industry by providing a forum for publishers to sell the unsold ad space on their websites to the highest bidding advertisers. The market for online advertising has become more fragmentary as Web users spend more time on social networks and blogs instead of relying on portals and other destination sites.
Yahoo currently operates the largest ad exchange through RightMedia, a business that Yahoo purchased for $650 million in 2007.
In July, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that display advertising is likely to be “the next billion dollar business” at Google.
Google generated nearly $22 billion in sales last year, virtually all of it from its paid search ad business, according to analysts.
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