On Search Ads, Google Sounding More Like Facebook

Google’s announcement of new search-advertising tools earlier this week must have put a smile on the faces of executives at Facebook. Google’s moves bolstered Facebook’s campaign to lessen the value advertisers place on search ads.

At the same time though, Google took steps to limit the fallout by highlighting the usefulness of “display” and video ads that it also sells.

At its AdWords Summit on Tuesday, Google told search-ad customers that it wants to help them shift away from a model known as “last-click attribution,” in which a search ad on Google that was clicked right before a sale on the advertiser’s site gets all the credit for that sale. Such a model doesn’t credit prior search ads that a person clicked on, or other marketing like TV ads or display ads online led to the Google search that preceded the sale.