• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 12, 2009

Google's continued investment in DoubleClick's ad-serving platform to support advertisers and agencies has the search engine unveiling a plan to roll out DFA Analytics, along with efforts to integrate Ad Planner into the DART for Advertisers (DFA) platform. Both should become available by the end of the month.

Google had already merged Google and DoubleClick technology. This launch is another step in this process to tightly integrate the two platforms. The move makes DFA the single portal for advertisers to plan, execute and measure campaigns.

The tighter integration aims to offer what Ari Paparo, group product manager at Google, calls a more efficient reporting and planning platform that gets quickly to the answers. "Think of it as something you do when drinking your morning coffee and reading the news," he says. "You come in and try to find out what happened yesterday. What performed and what didn't perform, and where did it perform. It should be intuitive, fast and easy to use."

Paparo says drilling through the data only takes about one or two seconds between reports, because when building out the platform Google focused on giving users quick answers to the data.

DFA Analytics should be intuitive for those who have used Google Analytics. It offers many of the same reporting and analytics technologies, such as graphical reporting, frequent updates for campaign performance about every three hours, ability to view stats at a glance, and drill-down through reports.

The integration of Ad Planner -- the research and media planning tool -- into DFA means that advertisers can easily collaborate on campaigns, as well as quickly review campaign performance. It aims to reduce the fragmentation in planning and executing that has troubled the industry.

Advertisers plan in one tool and execute in another, according to Paparo. In the future, bringing planning and execution into one application could provide major opportunities to help advertisers make better decisions on where to buy ads based on results.

Google could build in predictive algorithms to help determine which sites will produce better results for a given client based on prior campaigns. That's the vision to enable those functions, Paparo says. "The vision is to use an advertiser's or agencies' data on their behalf to figure out how to better make plans for their display advertising."

Ad Planner can assist agencies and advertisers in finding the right audience for campaigns. The tool provides insight into traffic estimates and demographics for the largest ten sub-domains for some domains. A search for ad placement feature alongside domains on the "Search by audience" tab lets users see traffic and demographic estimates for each ad placement. And interactive graphs provide a quick glance to compare reach and relevancy of the ads.