Like many agencies and advertisers, we’ve been dragging our feet before trying Google’s relatively new advertising options. My rationale has been that search (or PPC) advertising is inherently better than the traditional advertising media: print, radio and TV.

PPC advertising has been trouncing traditional media due largely to the fact that efficiency and accountability are “built in.” The auction model (almost) guarantees that ad spending will be no higher than necessary to remain competitive. But it’s the built-in accountability – the ability to monitor and adjust for optimal ROI or ROAS – that makes PPC advertising the ad medium of choice for profit-hungry advertisers.

Recently I took a closer look at Google’s print, radio and TV advertising capabilities – and son of a gun – they’ve got auction and ROI-tracking built in, too! Here’s what I found:

Let’s start with the easiest one: print. Google’s Print Ads system lets you place display ads in thousands of newspapers nationwide. It isn’t, strictly speaking, auction-based. Here’s what Google says:

“Print Ads advertisers extend bids to newspapers, essentially naming a price for the insertions they want. The publisher then has the opportunity to accept or decline that price. Unlike an auction system, a publisher is able to accept multiple bids as desired.”

So while it’s not an auction, advertisers can set a maximum price they’re willing to pay. In the nicely-designed AdWords interface for managing Print campaigns, advertisers see the newspaper’s “listed rate,” and can choose to bid below that rate.

Reporting is primitive, but accountability is as easy as tracking print ad performance has always been: advertisers can include a custom url in each ad, or a custom toll-free number, for example.

Good documentation of the Google Print Ads system is available here.

Let’s move on to a trickier realm: Radio advertising (well-documented here). Google calls this Audio Ads, taking into consideration that ads will eventually be delivered via a variety of channels in addition to Radio – in podcasts, for example.

With Audio Ads, advertisers have the option to either reserve or bid on available radio air time. Bidding is risky, since audio ads will only be run if/when there are available open time slots, but this allows advertisers to buy bargain air time and control their costs.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Accountability is not only built into Audio Ads—it’s even better and more valuable than Google’s search and content advertising.

First, there’s an option for free call tracking. That’s right: the service that others offer at high prices is free and built into Audio Ads. Here’s Google’s description:

“With call reporting, we’ll assign you a tracking phone number and redirect all calls it receives to the phone number of your choosing (we recommend your main business line). Call reporting lets you track the total number, the cities of origin, and the date and time, of calls that are made to your assigned call reporting number.”

Once you’ve set up call reporting in your AdWords account, create an audio ad that references your assigned number. When a user phones the call reporting number mentioned in your audio ad, Google passes the call on to your regular business number and records the basic details of the call. Then, you can sign in to your account to view a full report of all the calls.”

This, my friends, is huge. It lets advertisers assess their ads’ ROI right down to the city, date and time. (Google: will you be offering this to AdWords Search and Content advertisers soon?)

Even better—Google supplies a big set of reports that can be run within the AdWords interface. I won’t get into the details, but you can get a good idea from this screen shot of the report types available under the new Audio Ad Reports tab:

Let’s move on to even more interesting (and potentially more powerful) territory: TV advertising. Google announced their TV ad beta testing in April, and has recently posted details at http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads.

Details are still a bit sketchy, but it’s clear that the TV advertising system will feature an auction format (bidding based on CPM—cost-per-impression), and… wait for it… performance metrics:

“Once your ad has aired, use Google’s reporting metrics to immediately understand the effectiveness of your ads. Google is now plugged into millions of set top boxes and we are measuring second-by-second viewership data across all dayparts. This valuable data will enable you to find out which ads are engaging your viewers.”

Here’s a screen capture from Google’s online demo:

These early forays into traditional advertising media have huge implications:

• Google is determined to shift all advertising to an AdWords system that introduces auction and accountability to an industry that has never known such pinpoint efficiency and accuracy.
• Traditional ad agencies will succeed or fail depending on whether they can intelligently employ these new capabilities—which requires them to understand and embrace auction systems, analytics and accountability.
• “New media” agencies that bill themselves as “Full service” will need to broaden their skill sets to include radio, TV and print—or decide to stick to their search/content niches.

So ad industry brethren: you’ve received your heads-up. Get hip or get left behind.

We spotted a new Google AdWords phenomenon yesterday – as you know, Google “bolds” words in ad text that match the keywords you’re bidding on. The example below shows that synonyms of keywords are now appearing in boldface.

We’ve confirmed with Google that this is a new “feature,” and it also works with antonyms. So, for example, if the keyword is “GM,” and the words “General Motors” are included in the ad, then “General Motors” will appear in boldface.

I’ll leave it to enterpriseing readers to figure out how to use this gem to make all of an ad’s words appear in bold!

One month ago I mused about possible impact of Google’s DoubleClick acquisition on SEM agencies and bid management tool vendors. This week’s Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive sheds an interesting new light on the situation.

As I reported, DoubleClick (and now Google) sells a powerful PPC bid management system called DART Search. Features include one-screen management of ad campaigns on Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter and other services. It also allows automated bid price management according to rules set by the advertiser. So, for example, bid prices can rise or fall depending on position or ROI goals.

aQuantive is owner/operator of Atlas, a provider of digital marketing technologies, which sells, among many other things, the venerable Atlas Search (formerly Atlas OnePoint), one of the best-regarded bid management tools available. Its feature set is similar to DART Search.

I hope that Google and Microsoft enter into a healthy competition to provide these powerful cross-service bid management tools to agencies and advertisers—preferably at no cost, the way Google now provides Google Analytics. Why would either offer a tool that makes it easy to manage ad campaigns on their competitors’ platforms? Same reason that Google AdWords and Analytics allow conversion tracking of non-Google advertising now: to cement brand/product loyalty.

So that’s the good news; now the bad news. The acquisitions have placed Google and Microsoft squarely and imperiously in competition with SEO/SEM agencies. Microsoft’s aQuantive owns Avenue A | Razorfish, which bills itself as “the largest independent interactive agency.” And Google’s DoubleClick owns Performics, one of the largest SEO/SEM firms worldwide.

Will the acquisitors hold on to their agencies despite the fact that doing so might alienate some of their biggest customers? Microsoft may be more vulnerable than PPC-leader Google—who’s gonna stop advertising on AdWords? Or will each spin off their agency property to avoid conflict? Microsoft and Google: Bribe me with a free bid management system, and I’ll begrudgingly accept your competing with my relatively smaller agency.

This week’s announcement of Google’s new AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding may have been a whimper compared to the bang of its DoubleClick acquisition news. But the two events may be related in a way that could spell trouble ahead for the paid search bid management companies like Atlas, Omniture, KeyWordMax, etc.

Preferred Cost Bidding allows advertisers to set an average price they would like to pay per click (or per thousand impressions)—and then AdWords works automatically to ensure the click price hovers around the preferred bid price. It’s an alternative to arbitrarily setting bid prices high—the Maximum Bid we’re used to—and rewards savvy advertisers who have figured out their acceptable ROI and conversion rate, such that they know exactly what a click is worth to them.

In so doing Google has added another bid management alternative that was formerly the domain of pricey bid management/automation software. Google now offers Ad Scheduling (dayparting, or the ability to vary ad delivery by day of week and/or time of day), position preference (automatic adjustment of the bid price to attain a specified ad rank), cost-per-action bidding (where the advertiser pays only if/when a desired action, like a sale, is achieved) and a handful of other “bid automation” capabilities.

Little wonder that bid management companies at SES NY last week were downplaying the value of their bid automation features and instead trumpeting campaign management features that make it easy for advertisers and agencies to manage campaigns across multiple PPC services—mainly Google’s, Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s.

But does this put them on safe ground? The answer may be a big “No,” based on an aspect of the DoubleClick acquisition that didn’t make the headlines: DoubleClick sells a slick PPC bid/campaign management package called DART Search. It boasts features that put it squarely head-to-head with the category like Atlas Search and Omniture SerachCenter—which currently charge fees in the hundreds to thousands of dollars monthly.

A free bid/campaign Manager from Google makes perfect sense given their strategy to provide best-of-breed tools to PPC advertisers—think Google Analytics and the Website Optimizer, two acquisitions that Google now provides at no cost. But it’s likely to force the Atlases and Omnitures of the world to scramble to provide new features that set them apart from DART Search.