Content Management - AdGooroo launches tool for monitoring competitors’ display ads

When Apple recently launched an online display ad for the “Where the Wild Things Are” movie soundtrack, a new ad-monitoring platform from AdGooroo quickly revealed where the ad was appearing and which web sites were showing it to the most viewers.

Paul Demery

Chief Technology Editor

When Apple Inc. recently distributed an online display ad promoting downloads of the “Where the Wild Things Are” movie soundtrack on iTunes.com, a new ad-monitoring platform from AdGooroo revealed within a day where the ad was appearing and which web sites were exposing it to the most viewers.

AdGooroo, a Chicago-based provider of online advertising-tracking services, is developing the new Display Insight ad-monitoring tool as part of a suite of software that already includes SEM Insight and Trademarket Insight, which are tools for monitoring search marketing ads and the appearance of trademarks on web sites.

Richard Stokes, founder and CEO of AdGooroo, says the new Display Insight tool, currently still in an alpha test phase, is designed to show advertisers how their ads-and their competitors’ ads-are being distributed and viewed across the web. An advertiser can use Display Insight, for example, to show the top five advertisers of computer products in terms of the size of online audience they’re reaching, plus the ad-hosting web sites that are reaching the largest audiences, says Robin Simkins, executive vice president, client services.

Simkins adds that advertisers typically submit multiple versions of display and text-only ads to online ad networks, so the networks can run the version that best fits available space, and that Display Insight can show advertisers which versions of their ads are appearing on particular network sites. It also lets users view the full image of their own and their competitors` online ads soon after they`re posted online.

Stokes says Display Insight is designed to produce display ad data in four main areas:

Finding new media outlets for buying ad space by viewing where other advertisers are placing their ads;

Comparing an advertiser’s ad exposure to that of its competitors’ ads;

Seeing where an advertiser’s ads are appearing across multiple ad networks to check for any duplicate exposure on the same sites through different networks;

Checking where an advertiser’s ads are running to ensure its brand is not appearing on sites an advertiser doesn’t want to be associated with.

During Display Insight`s current alpha test phase, it is gathering ad information from the top 8,000 sites in the U.S. in terms of traffic volume, including sites in the Google and AOL content networks.

The Display Insight tool is expected to be launched commercially in early January, Stokes says. By then, he says, it will gather information from 100,000 web sites, including sites in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, including five major content networks. He has yet to name all five networks.