Google grabs another ad company

Google has bought another display ad company - the second this month.

The search giant is paying an undisclosed amount for Teracent which offers personalised display ads. Earlier this month Google paid $750m for AdMob which delivers display ads to iPhones and other mobile gadgets.

Teracent claims to be able to tweak adverts according to computer analysis of early reaction to different elements of the banner. It also offers analytics software to crunch the numbers produced by the ads.

Google's blog post said:

Teracent's technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

Privately-held Teracent was only formed in 2006 and has got through less than $10m in venture capital funding. It was started by a 26-year veteran of Inktomi with help from managers from Yahoo! and Advertising.com. ®