Updated Jan 28 9:30 a.m.
It’s no secret that Google has a big footprint in the programmatic space. But every once in a while, new data shows just how big that footprint can actually be.
The latest example: new data collected by Montreal-based programmatic technology company AdGear show that out of the top 1,300 e-commerce companies in North America, 898 (or 69%) use Google DoubleClick. Since July 2014, when AdGear last collected the data, Google’s penetration has grown 6%.
In cooperation with BuiltWith.com — which detects code tags, cookies and other markers that can be used to identify ad tech solutions being used on a given site — AdGear analyzed the websites of the top 1,300 North American e-commerce portals (as ranked by Comscore) to determine the most popular platforms for programmatic buying and selling. Not surprisingly, Google was at the top of several of the lists.
In addition to the DoubleClick buying platform, 69% of e-commerce companies use Google Display Network to sell ads,* 31% use Google Remarketing for ad retargeting (up from 20% in July 2014), 18% use Google Tag Manager, and an impressive 89% use Google Analytics.
“The outlier was Google,” said AdGear director of product marketing Ivan Roubtsov, who worked with the data. “Obviously they’ve hijacked a huge chunk of the customer base.”
But Google’s competitors shouldn’t despair — the majority of e-commerce advertisers use more than one DSP. The average e-comm advertiser uses 2.6 platforms, in fact. Roubtsov said that all of the companies in the sample were using at least one media platform.
Next to Google, the top five most common buying platforms were Twitter Ads (16%), Criteo (used by 16%), AdRoll (14%), and MediaMath (14%).
*Note: an earlier version of this story said it was unclear what per cent of companies were buying ads with Google and what per cent were selling ads with Google, but this has since been clarified.
