More Clicks for Google: What the DoubleClick Aquisition Means for Online Marketers

Another day, another multi-billion acquisition by Google. But this time, the search giant’s plans to acquire Doubleclick for $3.1 billion are making a lot of people in the advertising market nervous, with claims of a monopoly on the “pre-click” side of the advertising equation circulating. No one knows for sure how this mega-merger will impact the online advertising industry, but it’s certainly a wake-up call to those on the “post-click” side of the fence. According to Google “This new partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for us at Google to broaden and deepen our inventory of available ads and to better serve both our publishers and users.” That may be true, in part. Certainly, for online marketers, a combined Google-DoubleClick is an opportunity to bring a whole new level of interactivity to their “post-click” marketing, branding and online advertising programs. Fred Wilson wrote a great piece

about the resurgence of the banner ad and how banners carry branding value that search ads don’t.

But it also means that Google will own even more of the “pre-click” ad marketplace, and online advertisers will sign over even more of their online ad budgets to Google. The more Google owns the "pre-click", the more marketers will be forced to pay attention to the "post-click." In my opinion, to survive and thrive, marketers will have to increasingly control what happens on their sites after the click. With Google once again in the news, the whole world is focusing on driving traffic – but the experience that users have on the site is what turns those clicks into dollars.