Life of an Internet Entrepreneur

Google, which has been on a tear purchasing smaller web companies over the last year, announced that it has acquired GrandCentral, a company that helps users manage their phone communications.  Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

I have been using GrandCentral now for quite a while, and am hoping they keep the service active and supported (they claim it will be).

Why was this a strategic move for Google?

Google has spent a lot of money improving their AdWords advertising platform, including purchasing Urchin, the most respected webstat service, and integrating it as “Google Analytics“.  Analytics allows Adwords customers to track their return-on-investment (ROI) of campaigns they run online by tracking clicks and visits, and ultimately sales. 

Google has spent a lot of money improving their AdWords advertising platform, including purchasing Urchin, the most respected webstat service, and integrating it as “”.  Analytics allows Adwords customers to track their return-on-investment (ROI)of campaigns they run online by tracking clicks and visits, and ultimately sales. GrandCentral, a voice communications system, will allow Google to now offer an in-house solution for calls that come from an advertising campaign online.

For example, if you were running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign online, and wanted to know if the campaign was generating sales calls as well as clickthroughs or sales online, in the past you would need to setup a whole new phone number or use an outsourced solution, which cost money and was another control panel you had to keep track of.  Now, through the acquisition of GrandCentral, you would be able to track all the results of a campaign, from email (using GMail) to clicks and sales pages, all the way to the specialized phone number for each campaign from each source.

The bottom line: Advertising is about to get even more measurable.

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