Microsoft Claims Google Gets Undue Credit for Ad Conversions; Creating Integrated Ad Tracking System

Google undeservedly has gotten all the credit for many clicks on the online ads it delivers via its search engine, but Microsoft wants to put a stop to that. Currently, systems for tracking ad conversions and analyzing online marketing campaigns focus on the last ad a user viewed or clicked on, he said. This gives all credit to that last publisher and not to others the user may have been at before and influenced the user to seek more information about the advertiser. In particular, this situation has unfairly benefitted Google because many times someone will see a display ad on a site and go to Google, search for the vendor's name, and then click on the vendor's text ad served by Google. But Microsoft is developing a technology called "conversion attribution" that will track the trail of ads seen by a user, so that advertisers get a more complete understanding of how effective their marketing campaigns are, he said. Along the way, advertisers will get a more balanced view of the value of their ads across a wider trail of Web sites and via a variety of ad formats, not just the last ad displayed by the last publisher, which is often Google
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/19/Google-gets-undue-credit-for-ad-conversions_1.html