Just two weeks after buying mobile advertising company AdMob, Google on Monday announced plans to purchase Teracent, an online display advertising company.
Google did not disclose terms of the deal, which the search giant expects to close this quarter.
Teracent’s technology uses machine learning algorithms to customize advertisements to Internet users. It can choose from thousands of creative elements to customize the ads, Google said.
Those elements may include images, products, message or colors, and they can be combined based on factors such as geographic location, language, content of the Web site, time of day or past performance of different ads, Google said.
"This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns," wrote Neal Mohan, vice president of product management, and Joerg Heilig, engineering director at Google, in a blog post about the planned acquisition.
They said that the technology would be available to customers who run display ad campaigns on the Google Content Network as well as Google’s DoubleClick customers.
Workers at Teracent, which is based in San Mateo, California, will join Google.
In a brief statement on its Web site, Teracent said that the infrastructure, opportunities and technical depth that Google offers will enable continued product innovation for Teracent.
Earlier this year Google competitor Yahoo announced that it was working with Teracent to offer better ad campaign products to its display advertising customers.
Google announced on Nov. 9 that it planned to buy mobile advertiser AdMob for US$750 million. That's a major acquisition of the kind that Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said would happen only once a year.