Why DoubleClick Sucks

January 28th, 2008 by Peter Glaeser | RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

The Google-DoubleClick deal seems to go through. With the acquisition of DoubleClick Google adds a big portion of online advertising spaces to their portfolio. DoubleClick and Performics have a huge list of clients. But honestly, from a technological point of view they suck.

Here are my top three reasons why DoubleClicks sucks from a tracking point of view:

  1. The whole system is running on Pacific time only. That way the whole issue of reporting and statistics becomes a major pain in the ass for international advertisers.
  2. Most of the converison tracking is still based on tracking pixels only. DoubleClick doesn’t have a sophisticated system for backend synchronization of conversion data yet.
  3. The old DART for Advertisers (DFA) was based on an ugly XSLT technology with little usability. Hitting the back button in your browser was a big no-no.
  4. Support from DoubleClick is formalized and slow as you would expect it from the public administration.

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