New York — In June, Google released Google Ad Planner on an invitation-basis only, is a tool that is utilized by both publishers and advertisers for examining user demographics and search behavior is now available to everyone.
Google described Ad Planner as: The most useful research and media planning tool that combines advertisers and publishers in identifying targeted demographics for search advertising. Though Ad Planner is intended at media buyers to help them find the best sites to advertise on to reach their target audience, we have often used it as a way to compare sites within the same niche. When employing Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites that your audience is likely to visit.
In addition to opening up the tool to everyone with Google account, the Google Ad Planner has also rolled out some new features to make the tool more useful and profitable for both advertisers and publishers. These new features are:
- Added support feature for search queries and geo-targetting when defining ad audiences’ personal preferences when searching as well as their current location. So, for example, you could find sites about certain topics (like model trains) that are frequented by visitors from specific countries, regions, or metro areas (like Washington, DC).
- Added three new site ranking methods for managing how site results are ranked and displayed which can either be based on sites which are most likely to attract target audience, sites that increase ad campaign scale and a combination of both
- Added an interactive bubble chart which can be used for comparing sites based on their demographics, frequency, traffic and unique visitors. This is most useful for refining ad media plan targetting
In addition to traffic stats, Ad Planner also gives demographic data on a site’s traffic — age, gender, education, household income — and suggests related sites and keywords. It is hard to tell how accurate that information is, so it is not easy to gauge value. But certainly, Ad Planner provides a nice starting point for ad buyers.
The new public release of Ad Planner also includes a number of new features, including expansion into five new international territories: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain.
Many analysts signaled that Google’s offering would be damaging to established competitors like comScore, whose stock tumbled when Google’s product was announced.
Regardless of criticism, the new ad planner features should be helpful not only as the holidays roll around, but as businesses reallocate their marketing budgets and test different advertising strategies. They are going to need all of the data they can get.