Barry Hand

Google’s Ad Plan­ner is a handy lit­tle tool which can help you iden­tify what web­sites to adver­tise on.

A research and media plan­ning tool that con­nects adver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers. When using Google Ad Plan­ner, sim­ply enter demo­graph­ics and sites asso­ci­ated with your tar­get audi­ence, and the tool will return infor­ma­tion about sites (both on and off the Google con­tent net­work) that your audi­ence is likely to visit. You can drill down fur­ther to get more detail like demo­graph­ics and related searches for a par­tic­u­lar site, or you can get aggre­gate sta­tis­tics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

Com­score rival?

So is it a rival for Com­score or Omni­ture?, I’ve found that in some (not all) cases the data is quite sim­i­lar, as the data cov­ers not only AdSense web­sites — it can be used for research purposes.

Data comes from Google Search, Google Ana­lyt­ics, “opt-in exter­nal con­sumer panel data” and “other third-party mar­ket research.”, which could be: Search, Reader, Feed­burner, Adwords, Adsense, Check­out, Desk­top, Earth, iGoogle, Maps, Tool­bar, Blog­ger, Cal­en­dar, Docs, Gmail, Orkut and more, so not exactly fluffy stats.

Show me some figures

A quick overview shows 2.6m UV (Unique Vis­i­tors) in Ire­land, last time I was research inter­net usage in Ire­land (2007/08) it was around 2.1m — so this fig­ure isn’t too far off and is a good indi­ca­tor.
What’s inter­est­ing is the accu­racy of some of the sta­tis­tics, com­par­ing it to both my Com­score and Omni­ture data, it matched up quite well, although the fig­ure of UV’s for Boards​.ie in Ad Plan­ner is 240k (based on 30days) while that fig­ure has got to be much higher — as noted in ABC audit fig­ure of 1.7m.

Refin­ing your research allows you to drill down by County (not great for non cities) as well as language.

Tar­get­ing that Pol­ish Cork sweetspot

Here’s a quick view if I wanted to tar­get Pol­ish vis­i­tors in Cork, this exam­ple quickly shows the level of tar­get­ing avail­able with only two fil­ters applied.

You can also define an audi­ence, break­ing it down by web­sites that your tar­get audi­ence visit, again zon­ing in on your tar­get audience.

You can also break it down fur­ther based on web­sites vis­ited and key­words searched for.

Ok, do some­thing use­ful with this data

Once you’ve fil­tered down to the web­sites that match your cri­te­ria, you can export the list of web­sites for use in Google AdWords — and from there setup your place­ment ads to fit. For exam­ple — my cho­sen cri­te­ria allows me to tar­get 78K UV’s across 8 websites.

Ire­land get’s raw deal?

Yup, as the data size can run quite low when you apply a few fil­ters, this mes­sage is quite common.

Mean­while the level of tar­get­ting avail­able in other coun­tries also includes really use­ful (but prob­a­bly not accu­rate) info like the below.

Miss­ing out this key fil­ter on demo­graph­ics, makes a pos­si­bly really use­ful appli­ca­tion — only some­what use­ful. This addi­tional set of infor­ma­tion would put it in line with what’s avail­able from other pay per click net­works such as Face­book.

Sum­mary

Ad Plan­ner is essen­tially a tool to increase usage of the AdWords Con­tent Net­work, and for the most part it is use­ful, espe­cially as a research tool — and is good to quickly crunch some fig­ures for web­sites — espe­cially as it makes use of Google’s vast net­work of data.

More insights on Google Ad Planner

• Google Ad Plan­ner review on SEOChat
• Com­pet­i­tive Intel­li­gence Ana­lytis by Avinash Kaushik
• Is Google Ad Plan­ner Get­ting Its Data from Google Tool­bar on TechCrunch
• Google Ad Plan­ner v Com­score Data