Google is once again in the news getting the blogosphere all hot and bothered because of its new Print Ads service which will debut fairly soon in an “alpha” run, to finish in January.  Several reputable newspapers have signed on, such as the New York Times and Washington Post.  The details of the issue have been discussed elsewhere, so I won’t repeat them.  But what’s quite fascinating is the motivation for newspapers to try this grand experiment.  Businessweek writes:

One ad executive involved in the test says the opportunity to tap Google’s vaunted advertising measurement capabilities is a major selling point. “The platform has the potential to allow us to better measure and better understand how our print advertising drives Internet traffic,” said Bruce Telkamp, senior vice-president for business development at online health insurance marketer eHealth.

Telkamp says eHealth has used newspaper advertising in the past but was dissatisfied with the tools available from newspapers and media-buying agencies to measure return on investment. Advertising executives have long adored the rich data on customer behavior that Google AdWords provides.For instance, Google allows advertisers to see in real-time which ads get the most clicks. Traditional media ads do not come with such metrics.

Of course — and the problem is that newspapers, in which these ads are running, are STILL TRADITIONAL MEDIA!

Sure, there’s going to be a fancy auction process — or whatever — in deciding which advertisers get which spots, but I still don’t see how newspapers are going to track how print advertising drives internet traffic.

In the end, ads are going to be put in papers. They might “code them” specifically so people who respond to them will show as responding to a Google bought-ad (”ask for Nancy”, call a specific phone number, mail to PO box 51 and so on).  But these are just plain ol’ direct marketing tricks.

Once ads are in the papers, I just don’t see how anyone can specifically tell a) where people are coming from b) how it relates to what they next do online.  Unlike how it works online, you can’t place a tracking device on people’s behaviour (cookies and more) after someone’s read an ad in the newspaper!  It just seems like a technological impossibility that Google will be be able definitely correlate any changes in internet activity in any metric — either in traffic to websites, signing up for free subscription offers, or giving patronage to other advertisers.

I mean, am I missing the boat here?  Or has Google somehow conjured up a way to use black magick to track these metrics?

Google’s already had a failed trial with traditional media — I’m not sure how things are any different this time.

And Mystical Metrics aside — does anyone else see the rich irony in this story?

In this day and age of declining newspaper fortunes one of the biggest agents of change AWAY from newspapers, that directly has a competitor to newspapers (news.google.com), and that steals away advertising away from newspapers (adwords), is now going BACK to newspapers to sell their ad space (and getting a cut of the deal as part of it)?