Our fifth installment of reports from the July 31 Google B2B Summit looks at the breakout session presented by Damian McKenna of DoubleClick titled, “Google, DoubleClick, and the Future of Online Display Advertising.”

McKenna accurately pointed out that, while online budgets are growing, online fragmentation also is increasing. With search, social media, online video, online advertising, in-text advertising and others splintering online budgets, both targeting and measuring the success of online campaigns are becoming extremely complex.

This complexity, he contends, leads to chaos in planning and measuring. This chaos, in turn, leads to artificial silos of information that prevent marketers from getting a true picture of the effectiveness of their online efforts.

The solution to this problem that Google and DoubleClick offer is Dart for Advertisers (DFA), an ad management and serving solution that helps online advertisers manage the entire scope of their digital marketing program. DFA allows an advertiser to target online advertising across multiple delivery modes segmenting by:

• Audience segment
• Geography by DMA, countries, states and ZIP and area codes
• Daypart
• Website content, categories and site placements
• Browser type and operating system
• Keywords

DFA then helps on the measurement side by removing “artificial silos” and providing the advertiser with a single unified reporting interface.

Another product highlighted by McKenna is the DoubleClick Boomerang product. Boomerang has been around, at least in theory, for quite some time. The basic idea is this: When you show a prospect your advertisement, you also cookie them as having seen it. Then, using simple tags inserted into your web site, you are able, over a period of time, to track to see if that prospect visits your site and takes a desired action. Based on the tracking of that behavior, you can then display alternate creative to that prospect if you should see him again with your advertising. This brings a temporal context to your advertising.

Here is an example of how Boomerang might work for a b-to-b advertiser:

Let’s say you are a heavy equipment manufacturer using a banner campaign to drive prospects to a lead generation form that will generate potential sales calls. You might find that your banners are generating a .5% CTR but that your landing page form is experiencing a fairly low (let’s say 5%) completion rate. This is a common experience with online lead generation programs, particularly in the b-to-b space, as many transactions require high consideration and multiple touches to move prospects along the buy cycle.

Rather than targeting these prospects with the same ad after already getting them to your landing page once, you can now recognize users who already have clicked through once, but did not convert, and target them with a message that addresses objections to filling out the form at this moment. Ease of use, increased incentive, or detailed explanation of process can all be solid strategies for this “second” chance at a conversion.

Overall, the forward thinking advances presented by DoubleClick demonstrate that they are looking ahead to not only serve and track online advertisments, but also to solve growing fragmentation and targeting problems for online advertisers.