The Official Google Blog gives a comprehensive explanation of why the search giant bought ad serving company, DoubleClick.

“Google and DoubleClick play different but complementary roles in online advertising. Google primarily sells ads, and DoubleClick delivers (serves) ads. The relationship between Google and DoubleClick is analogous to the relationship between Amazon.com and Federal Express. Amazon.com makes money by selling a book to the consumer. Federal Express makes money by delivering it to the consumer.

“In summary, we’re buying DoubleClick because:

1. DoubleClick’s products and technology are complementary to our search and and content-based text advertising business, and give us new opportunities to improve online advertising for consumers, advertisers and publishers.
2. Historically, we’ve not allowed third parties to serve into Google’s AdSense network, which has made it hard for advertisers to get performance metrics. Together, Google and DoubleClick can deliver a more open platform for advertisers, and provide the metrics they need to manage marketing campaigns.
3. By combining Google’s infrastructure with DoubleClick’s knowledge of agencies and publishers, we can create the next generation of more innovative ad serving technology, one that significantly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of online advertising.
4. To manage ad inventory, some of the largest publishers use DoubleClick DART for Publishers – but a good portion of it goes unsold. It’s our view that the combination of DoubleClick and Google will help these publishers succeed by monetizing their unsold inventory.

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Google has acquired RSS specialist Feedburner for around $100m.

Feedburner’s customers are said to include the Wall Street Journal, the BBC and Amazon. Retailers and travel agents are now sending promotional offers to online customers via Feedburner.

Google sees the technology as opening the way for its huge array of advertisers to reach some of the most active groups of Web users, like social networkers, or the growing numbers using mobile phones.

Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management wrote in her blog, “We’re constantly looking for ways to identify and offer new tools for content creators and Web site publishers,” adding that the purchase helps it provide new tools for its customers.

Feedburner’s analytics also help Web publishers know who reads their sites, as well as embedded advertising in RSS feeds.

Feedburner Co-founder and Chief Executive Dick Costolo told reporters on a conference call, “It is going to get more and more important for publishers to have this round-trip view of their audience.” Costolo is joining the Google board.

This is just the latest in a series of rapid moves by Google to consolidate the fast-growing online advertising market. The deal will expand Google’s existing blog advertising service, AdSense into feeds.

CNN reports, “Feedburner counts more than 430,000 Web site publishers as users of RSS. A total of 736,000 RSS feeds, including roughly 110,000 audio or video feeds, are delivered to readers as publishers update their Web sites, the company said. The 30-employee company will remain based in Chicago.

“Feedburner has raised $10 million from Mobius Venture Capital, Portage Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Union Square Ventures. ”

Internet advertising is increasing rapidly on all measures. A need is developing for a big player to step up to the plate and provide a Big-Ad Lite service. Now Google is moving into this marketplace and, as with Adsense, it’s likely to set the standard.

The Wall Street Journal reports :

The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks. […] Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way — through a salesperson — or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space — called “inventory” — remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.

This is good news for a significant swathe of small online businesses stuck between the vast mass of “blogs” beneath and the bigco websites above.

If Google can come up with an automatic solution as simple and seller-friendly as Text Link Ads, with geo-location and other factors built in, it will take mass advertising on the net to a new level. It will also improve the bottom lines of small-business digital networks beyond recognition.

Google’s buy-out of DoubleClick provides the platform. This could be the most exciting development for online business in years, taking advertising from professional operators to ordinary publishers on the shop floor.

A new advertising system has been announced by Google. Instead of its now traditional cost-per-click arrangement centered around Adsense and AdWords, the company has introduced “Pay-Per-Action — Pay only for actions that you define”.

“… you’ll create an ad and define the action that you want a user to perform when they visit your site, such as signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product. Then you’ll set the amount that you’re willing to pay when this action is completed.”

The point of the procedure is that you’ll only pay when a user clicks on your ad, visits your site, and completes your desired action.

Pay-per-action ads complement your current campaigns by providing a new pricing model that extends your reach and allows you to pay only when a defined action is completed on your site. This beta feature is currently available to AdWords advertisers in the United States on a limited basis as part of our beta test. Read below to find out more.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch thinks the new ad system will crunch the affiliate middlemen. “Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. These networks also operate on a cost-per-action basis, mostly with online retailers. Even though some of them have scale, they will not have the ability to compete with Google on sheer size of network.”

That remains to be seen, but no-one can fault Google’s determination to remain in the forefront of internet advertising.