Google recently rolled out two new web marketing metrics as part of its Brand Activate Initiative, aimed at helping marketers gauge their campaigns more effectively.

Google will soon launch a new initiative aimed at making the assessment of web marketing campaigns more accurate and actionable for companies. The Brand Activate Initiative, which the company released at the Ad Age Digital Conference, will start with the roll out of two tools for marketers to gauge their ad success in real time.

The first feature is Active View, which combines principles from a series of current metrics. Google said in its AdWords Agency blog that it will soon submit the tool to the Media Rating Council for approval.

Active View differs from typical viewing metrics in that it does not count impressions simply because an ad appears on the page. According to Google, an Active View occurs when at least 50 percent of the ad is viewed on a screen for at least one second. The company will give marketers specific insights on how much of an ad was visible and for how long.

By giving marketers Active View metrics, companies can be sure they’re making judgements based on more accurate data. Brafton recently reported that more than 30 percent of all display ads are never seen. Frequently, an ad will appear on a web page below the fold or in a toolbar that users ignore or never scroll enough to see.

The second tool, Active GRP, offers an online variation of a traditional offline marketing reach metric. The gross rating point is a calculation of the frequency with which an ad is viewed and the percentage of the target audience reached. Multiplying these figures gives a marketer the GRP of an ad.

Active GRP differs from its offline predecessor in that it does not weigh each view the same.

“Active GRP is calculated by a statistical model that combines aggregated panel data and anonymous user data (either inferred or user-provided), and will work in conjunction with Active View to measure viewed impressions,” Google’s Neal Mohan, vice president of display advertising, wrote in the company blog post.

Each metric is aimed at making data more actionable for marketers to inform their campaigns. Adding real-time elements to more traditional marketing metrics will help advertisers keep up with the evolving web and quickly shift their marketing focus based on results to maximize success.

Helping businesses make decisions based on the economic value of various marketing campaigns is clearly a focus at Google. Brafton recently reported the company rolled out more tools for marketers in its Analytics Suite. Multichannel sales attribution shifts the paradigm of conversion attribution to include each channel, such as organic search or social media marketing, a prospect interacted with prior to conversion, rather than just the final one.

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.