• by Shankar Gupta , February 10, 2006

Google this week launched a pilot program to test the demand among its AdWords advertisers for magazine advertisements. Through the program, AdWords users can bid on full, half, or quarter-page spots in magazines including Ellegirl and Motor Trend.

"We're constantly looking for new ways to provide effective and useful advertising to advertisers, publishers, and users. As part of this effort, we've been conducting a series of tests to determine how we could bring additional value to print advertising," a Google spokesman said. "We are continuing to experiment in this area and are now testing the application of an auction model to print media."

The deadline for the bids on the first slate of print ads is Feb. 20, and the first ads will appear in April. Among the magazines involved are Car and Driver, Budget Living, Entrepreneur, Martha Stewart Living, Women's Health & Fitness, PC World, Official Xbox Magazine, and InfoWorld.

The pilot program is apparently part of a Google effort to provide advertisers with inventory beyond online search ads. Google Vice President of Advertising Sales Tim Armstrong indicated at a keynote address for a Software & Information Industry Association conference last week that the company intended to further expand into traditional media. "The notion is... we're able to help advertisers break into other media, such as print, radio, and other areas, which will help the publishers themselves do better yield management," Armstrong said. "Our advertisers and publishing partners want to run their ads everywhere that makes sense for them, as long as it's profitable."

Search expert Gary Stein said the move indicates that Google is ready to move beyond search ads. "This really doesn't have much to do with organizing the world's information. This is them saying they have strong relationships with advertisers, so let's see what other kind of products we have to sell them," he said. "It sort of signals Google is one more piece that they're moving their way towards being this full-service advertiser."

Stein noted that, while built on an auction-based model similar to Adwords, the print ad pilot is not especially "Google-esque." "They're just selling an ad--meaning there's no targeting behind it, there's no keywords, there's no analytics behind it," he said. "How do you optimize, how do you get greater targeting--all that stuff you like from Google--this isn't really like that."